SG: Saga of the new Alterran Empire: Book 1 Earth
by Malicious World Builder
Summary: When a Jaffa completes a Goa'uld experiment it's time for the Alterra (Ancients) to rise again. Old threats rise again while new lurk in the shadows ready to strike before the Alterra have a chance to get of their feet. Due to large holes in the story's plot armour character death is to be expected. "Book 2: Goa'uld" was 50% done when the first chapter of this story was posted.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** See profile

 **A/N:** There's an eight out of ten chance that I will kill a major/main character during the course of the story. If you don't like it you can bugger off to some other story.

 **A/N 2:** Flamers can go to a deep hole and jump into it. Everyone else should enjoy the story.

I think that's everything. Follow the above, be realistic, this is a story and it's written to be fun, not a 100% correct, and we will all get along and enjoy this story.

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Mokar. That's was the name he'd been given and the name he carried. At the moment he was lying face up in the sand as his body recovered from the Zat'nik'tel shoot he'd gotten in the arena.

That cursed place was nothing more than a ruined city where eight Jaffa were taken every seventh revolution of the fiery orb in the sky. Each of the Jaffa was only allowed their most basic clothes and a single Zat'nik'tel. The last one standing would walk away while the other seven would never be seen again. All Jaffa participated in the arena on the year of their twentieth birthday, those who survived the arena trained the coming participants. Of course more Jaffa where birthed than needed in the arena, but strangely enough there were never more Jaffa than needed for the arena.

Now he'd failed in the arena and he could see the gray pyramidic shape of the Tel'tak, which had picked up the losers ever since he was a kid, looming overhead as the rings sliced through the air and enveloped him in a bright light. As the light faded he saw the rings falling down into the ground beneath him. But if the black roof with it's golden supports were anything to go by he was inside, so it must have been through the floor that the rings fell. The wonders of their goddess Arinna never failed to amaze him.

From his right two pair of hands dragged him to the side before the rings came through the floor again and another knocked out Jaffa appeared in the bright light. Without care the owners of the two hands stepped over him pulled the other Jaffa out from where the rings came and went. As the muscles in his neck returned to his control he turned his head to his right and saw the heads of at least two other, one of which he'd taken down himself.

Looking back up he just had time to see a man he couldn't quite place firing a Zat'nik'tel into his face.

The next thing he felt was ice cold water pouring over his face. Without as much as wiping it of his face he sat up and opened his eyes to see the a well armoured back leaving the tight cell he was now in. Apparently others were given the same awakening because he could hear shouts and curses coming from outside the cell. Stuffed in a corner he could see his armour and his staff, which he quickly collected and hurried to dress in.

From outside he heard the calling, a sound he couldn't describe if anyone asked, which signalled that their goddess had another announcement to make. Something which seemed kind of strange since he would never been seen again.

Stepping out of his cell he could see six of the other participants, but not Burdoc which meant he was the winner. Probably through the use of his fists and feet if the bruises on three of the others was anything to go by, at least he'd avoided that fate and gotten a blast in the face from Korac, who herself looked like her face had gone up against the underside of Burdoc's foot.

On the far side of the open area the glorious form of their goddess rose towards the roof he guessed was there given the lack of bright light on the otherwise always clear sky which had always been above their heads. From her huge form he heard her mighty voice. "Hear me Jaffa. You have failed in the arena but as your benevolent goddess I offer you the chance to live again. Pass through the door at my feet and you will be brought to the first challenge, at the entrance you will find the supplies I have bestowed upon you for the journey. My first prime will inform you when your chance to live again has come." Then she faded away and a large man came out from a side room, the golden mark on his forehead glowing in the artificial light which seemed to come from everywhere at the same time, and strode up to the six.

Without as much as a second of hesitation he walked up to one of the more heavily bruised Jaffa and shoved him down the three small steps in the direction of the gateway which stood where their goddesses feets had been placed seconds before. When the Jaffa hesitated in front of the yellow gateway the first prime gave him a forceful kick in the back so that he fell through the yellow gateway, then the first prime picked up the things left right beside it and threw it through the gateway before he motioned for the others to leave.

Unsure of where to go he directed his steps back to the cell he'd awoken in. He'd perform Kelno'reem until it was his turn. Then he'd be well prepared for the challenges. As he sat down on the floor to begin he heard a shriek which made every hair on his body stand. It took him a few seconds to calm down but it wasn't long until he achieved Kelno'reem and it wasn't until he received a smack on the head from the first prime that he awoke.

Still not talking the first prime motioned for the door and the gateway beyond. Taking the hint he got up and left the cell behind. At the gateway he picked up the stuff quickly. He couldn't have been more than three quarters of the other mans high and he didn't feel like getting that big foot in his back. The surface of the yellow gateway wasn't sticky like it looked, it actually didn't feel like anything other than the surrounding air. When he stepped through he felt a slight tingling feeling but it was gone when he came through. Once on the other side he sat down with his back against the wall, from this side he could clearly see the first prime walking away and when he tried to move his hand back through the door a clear but solid barrier blocked him.

Turning his attention back to the task at hand he looked through what he had, there was his armour, his staff and Zat'nik'tel. In the supplies given to him by his goddess was a Chappa'ai dialler and a tablet with the address and an order to return to the planet when given the chance, he'd never used the Chappa'ai but it was all part of the training. Also in the supplies were lots of food and water, enough for several weeks if he rationed it and that was it. Not even an instruction, but with only one path to go it wasn't to hard to make the call on his own. A few hundred steps into the corridor the yellow stone walls changed into dark grey metal walls with intriguing patterns, but he wasn't here for those where he? No his task had been to complete the challenges and return to his life.

Some distance down the path it opened up into a large hall. A quick check of the walls showed no opening, only the door he came through. Halfway to the other side of the room he saw a brown pile lying. Looking back up he saw the room had changed to a desert like the one surrounding their village without him moving a single step and when he looked back the brown pile was lying in the same place but now it was sitting on top of a stone pillar which stretched out above a chasm which seemed to lead down into and endless abyss in both directions. Crossing the gap from the cliff he was standing on to the pillar was a small bridge and small really meant small in this case, it was at most half the width of his foot.

But that didn't matter, the brown pile of rags could be the Jaffa who came before and one more Jaffa could be helpful. And if he was dead then any trap out there would already have been springed. So he stripped of his armour, something which went against everything he'd been thought, to lighten his load a bit. Taking a careful step onto the bridge he heard a rock tumble down the side of the cliff. Another step created a crack along the entire bridge. The next step shook the bridge, throwing him off his feet. When the shakings stopped he was hanging in one hand but even with just a few fingers the overly fit Jaffa could have pulled himself up with ease, so once back on the bridge he steadied himself and took another four steps before he felt a gust of wind from his right. A quick glance in the direction revealed a pillar of sand coming over the horizon and it was growing in size quickly. Slightly increasing his pace he took the last ten steps to the pillar and the brown pile. The top of the pillar wasn't awfully large, but it still gave him enough room to kick the pile slightly and when nothing happened he pulled the brown rag of it.

Beneath the rag was the Jaffa who'd entered before him, but he was long gone, the metal of his armour fused into his flesh and the staff lying as a molten mess in his hands. Flipping the Jaffa over he saw the deformed face of his former comrade, but protected beneath the body was the Zat'nik'tel and all of the supplies he'd been given at the start of the journey. As he begun to pick up the stuff he felt the first grains of sand caressing his skin and a quick gaze in the direction of the sandstorm showed it to be dangerously close. Judging his options he dropped all but the food and water and quickly but steadily got back onto solid ground. He didn't need to look back to know that the crushing sound was the pillar falling down into the abyss. As a kid he'd heard the same sound when one of the other kids had played on a similar pillar over a much shallower crevice and it had collapsed. Ever since then he'd been afraid of heights. A Jaffa was not afraid of anything, so he'd trained every day to get over it, to ignore the feeling of dread he felt every time he could see ground which was further down than the ground he was standing on.

Now the sandstorm was beginning to make its presence known properly. A quite look revealed nothing but sand on his side of the abyss and on the other side he could see a dune rising up in the distance. He'd been in enough sandstorms to weigh his options against each other. It didn't take him more than a few seconds to make the call to move further into the endless desert, away from the abyss. A short time before the sandstorm was about to hit him he laid down in the sand on the leeward side of a tiny dune and pulled up his cloak to cover his face. Then he settled down to ride out the storm, just like they'd done so many times during training.

Several hours later the storm passed and he begun to shake of the sand. When he looked around he no longer saw the desert around him but a great hall, with perfectly smooth black walls, filled with bodies in different positions, some almost fresh and some no more than rotting bones. Looking to the far side of the room he saw a bright light approaching him. Turning around to find a place to look over his situation he stumbled and fell on the leg of a long dead Jaffa, shoving his face into the pouch on another Jaffa's stomach. Pulling out he realised the pouch was burnt out and as was the one on the Jaffa right next to him.

The symbiote inside him was a gift from Arinna just like those who'd been inside the others now lying dead on the floor, what ever her reasons their goddess must have been angry at them for using the gift in such a way. Yet it was her divine gift. In a hurry to finish before the approaching light reached him he begun to throw away the bodies around him. Then he fell on his knees and plunged one hand into his pouch. As he withdrew the slimy symbiote from his pouch he grasped it with both hands and held it out in front of him as a gift to the light. When the light hit the symbiote it turned into burning red and crimson flames engulfing his hands, burning both flesh and skin from his fingers.

When he no longer felt the symbiote twisting between his fingers the light returned to its white soothing colour and continued its path forward. As he was almost standing with his back to the wall the light soon faded when it reached the wall, plunging the room into total darkness. Then a bright light surrounded him, just like the rings before, and he found himself inside yet another room. This one had the grey metallic walls with the patterns on them and a narrow path leading away.

Taking the cue he got up and carefully moved down the path. A few steps down the path a clear barrier blocked his path and another stopped him from going back. After a second two purple ribbons wrapped around him as red and blue dots followed and joined the two together. Unable to move he could only watch as the dots moved and changed colour for several minutes, until both barriers, the ribbons and the dots vanished as suddenly as they'd appeared. Hesitant about what was happening he slowed his pace and felt as the world begun to spin around him. Another dozen steps brought him up to the next pair of barriers where his body was forcedly straightened and turned towards one of the walls, this one held a dark green round plate with a smaller round, pitch black, hole inside it. Round really wasn't the right word, because the plate and the hole wasn't circles or ellipses, but rather a circle upon which eight smaller circles had their center, but round was probably the easiest way to describe it, so his mind would settle for it.

As his face was positioned in front of the hole a bright light engulfed his face, all these bright lights were beginning to burn his eyes, but for his goddess he'd look right into the fireball in the sky for as long as it burned. Then his head fell limp to his side and the invisible barriers carried him away deeper into the corridor.


	2. Chapter 2

He awoke on a hard surface which had made his back sore. As he opened his eyes he saw the same grey walls he'd seen before he'd passed out converging into an equally grey roof. When he sat up a man appeared out of nowhere right in front of him. Bolting for his belongings which had been placed on a table he noticed the man continued to look towards the bed while he circled around him. Whatever the man was saying it was mumbo jumbo to him so he quickly got what he needed and left the room. The corridor outside the room was lined with rooms just like the one he'd come from, only a raised platform and a grey table.

After pacing up and down the corridor without finding any way out he begun to search through the rooms one by one. A long time later he heard the man falling silent and as he put his head back into the room he found no trace of the man, but he still had many rooms left to search.

After what he estimated to be half a revolution he'd run out of rooms to search so he got back to the room he'd awaken in. As he sat down on the raised platform he presumed to be a bed the man once again appeared out of nowhere. This time however he understood that the man was greeting him so he said a few words of greeting back, strangely he didn't understand the words coming out of his mouth, but he knew them to be the right ones.

The rest of the man's long speech was still mostly unintelligible to him, but a few words slipped through into his head. Enough for him to make an escape, when the man vanished he got up and got out into the corridor. There at the end of the corridor was the amber light he sought. He swept his hand across it and a bright light surrounded him.

He felt the surface under his feet change to a much softer texture and his brain recognized the planet as Gamia when the light faded away. It was a world they had planned to terraform, but due to the disease which had struck them they had abandoned the galaxy before that was possible. When they were forced to flee back to Avalon they had begun to spread and place the repositories. Then this world had been chosen as a training ground of sorts.

No, not they, it was a race now long forgotten, not memories of his own people. It was memories of someone else which as floating around in his head. Still he had his mission, his goddess had commanded and he followed. Walking up to the Chappa'ai he placed the dialler and entered the address to return home. When the Astria Porta activated he hurried through it to the other side.

Coming through the wormhole, as his brain identified it as, he saw twelve Jaffa with their staffs pointed at him. As soon as they saw who he was they stepped aside. From behind the Jaffa their goddess climbed the four steps up the side of the platform. "Finally one returns from the trials."

As he opened his mouth to speak she waved her hand to stop him. "Come with me." Turning around she begun to walk down towards her temple. In the presence of his goddess and with her silencing gesture he dared not speak, yet somewhere in the back of his head he heard a voice shouting for him to lower his staff and shoot the false goddess in the back. But to him she was a true goddess, where did these strange new thoughts come from? It did not really matter to him, he would perform his duty no matter what the voices in his head said, still the voice grew in strength with every passing second.

Still walking in silence they entered the golden pyramid which was her temple. The passageways she led him through took them through a hidden door down into the large hall where he had begun the trial the day before. There was something new again, day, it seemed to be the same as a revolution of the fiery orb in the sky but the expression seemed to mean more than that, yet the full meaning eluded him. "Rest, tomorrow you will show another through the trials." She said pointing at the same small room he had slept in before.

Without a seconds hesitation he obeyed and sat down on the floor to do so. There was another thing he did not recognised, seconds, it was both the thing after the first and a measure of time. Sixty of the seconds was a minute, sixty minutes was an hour and twenty four hours was a day his mind told him. With his goddess gone he begun to perform Kelno'reem. For almost two hours he tried to achieve it, with no success. Following an advice given to him by his long dead father he closed his eyes and layed down on the floor. Slowly he heard the voice in the back of his head quieting down along with the rest of his thoughts until only blackness remained.

Through the night his head was filled with colorful and vivid images but when he opened his eyes they begun to fade from his memory. As he sat up he saw his goddess looking at him with anger. "You dare defy your goddess?" She shouted as her first prime pulled him off the ground.

Still staff in hand something in him snapped. He slammed the back end into the other man's face and he heard a satisfying crack when the staff hit its target and another as he drove him into the wall. "You dare defy yo..." Was all the hag could say before an orange bolt hit her in the chest from point blank range.

There he stood, behind him the first prime was slumped against the wall with a crushed skull and in front of him his former goddess, a being he had always thought of as immortal and all knowing, was lying dead at his hand. Yet instead of remorse he felt free, a feeling he had never felt before or even known the concept of, and he liked it.

Snapping him out of his thoughts was the voice of someone shouting to sound the alarm. Looking outside he saw Burdoc shouting from the top of his lungs, something a shot from the staff took care of even if it only hit him in the shoulder. Still someone must have heard it because he could hear the alarm. As he ran towards the stairs he could see all of his old masters storming out of the doorway and into the large room. Seeing only one way to avoid all the plasma bolts the storming Jaffa were raining onto anyone and anything that moved he made a dash for the gateway to the trials.

Running as fast as he could towards the gateway he fired the staff at his attackers. A few steps from the gateway he felt a burning heat against his back and he was pushed head first into the gateway.

Once again a bright light enveloped him and he found himself on the hard bed. The man, a hologram as his brain called it, appeared again with the same speech. But this time he understood it from start to finish.

The man talked about the rise of the Alterran race and how they had split into two, one faction leaving the galaxy but still claiming the name Alterran as their own while the others stayed and called themselves the Ori. Their greatest moments and their failures. Their technology and their way of life. Then he finished with their fall, the creation of the repositories and the task that was now programmed into his mind.

Especially intriguing he found the part when the hologram talked about the Alterra's rise in their new home, small populations in thirty six galaxies. Millions of years later their small numbers and aggressive confrontations with native populations in each galaxy had forced them all to return to Avalon. Following the evacuation to Avalon a plague had decimated the population and once again they fled, this time to three galaxies they had seeded with life but then stayed away from to study the paths their seeds would take without supervision. Yet the man in the hologram and two other Alterra chose to build the repositories and spread them into the galaxy so that the seeded in Avalon would discover and use them to gain the knowledge of those who had come before. Through them the Alterran race would rise again in the event that the three new galaxies became their undoing.

To one of the three galaxies the crown piece of their fleet, Atlantis, had been taken. The other two had been settled by the rest of their fleet. As Atlantis was by far the fastest it had travelled to the one furthest away and had seeded a new gate network which would allow access to all but one of the original galaxies, for fear of letting out the plague again from its assumed origin, while also not allowing direct access to the other two new galaxies to isolate them in case something happened. The other two galaxies were suppose to be seeded in the same way but all contact with the remainder of the fleet was lost and never re-established.

As their number began to dwindle in the city they begun to ascend and the Alterran created a race more advanced than the seeds they had spilled into the galaxy but more primitive than themselves to help with their stewardship of the galaxy. When a terrible enemy once again drove them from their new home to Avalon only a handful of the Alterra lived and later ascended while most of the evacuees were of the new servant race.

Yet before the Alterra begun to fade away expeditions were sent to both of the other galaxies through the gate networks which had been seeded there, but once the wormhole was closed nothing more was heard from them. That was the final nail in the coffin for the Alterran race, soon they were nothing but rumours and legends in the galaxy.

The ones who found and used the repositories all died shortly after exposure. While the other grew content as ascended one Alterran retook physical form and designed these trials to find one suitable to be forcibly evolved, his or her DNA changed to that of an Alterran so the knowledge could be safely downloaded. Now he had completed the trials.

When the hologram vanished he thanked it and knew it would not return unless he summoned it. Now he was set free upon the galaxy to restore his brethren to their full glory yet all he had to start with was the ruined armour on his back, both his staff and the rest of his gear had been lost on his way to the gateway but on the upside the wound on his back had healed enough for him to move without pain again. And then there was the list of all gates and planets in his head, which according to the hologram was at the least nine thousand years old. But it was all he had to work with so he made his way to the gate and put his hand upon the red orb of the clavis, or dialler as it apparently was known to the majority of the population in the galaxy, nine thousand years ago. Working his way through the list in his head he quickly crossed several of them as their diallers didn't respond, sadly Terra's dialler reported the gate missing even if it itself still was there and running on low power.

Picking an address at random from those with Alterran facilities he called its dialler and it replied. Looking through the dialler with his mind he saw several Jaffa patrolling the area around the gate. Picking another he got the same result with plenty more Jaffa around. Going back to the top of the list and starting from there he searched until he found a planet with no living things in the vicinity and no registered wormholes since the last Alterran had left the planet.

In his mind Jobos, as the Alterra had called it, was perfect, so he dialled the gate and stepped through. The only Alterran structure was a small stasis research lab of the more sturdy metal design sitting on a cliff high above the gate. The small sensor package in the dialler had shown him a set of rings but when he tried to activate them they refused to move.

Groaning he looked back at the cliff and the narrow path which hugged the cliff face on its way up to the lab. It was either that or falling down on the lab from above, neither of which he felt like trying, but the narrow path still won and he begun the hike upwards. Apart from a few rocks he sent flying down the cliff the trek to the lab was nice and quiet.

Once he was standing below the emergency hatch leading into the lab he swiped his hand over the dormant crystal but to no surprise the hatch did not move. He forced open the locking mechanism with the small wheel on the side of the hatch and with some force he pushed the hatch up and let it slid to the side to gain entrance to the lab. Inside the only light offered to him was the light coming in from the hatch.

Not surprisingly the internal lights refused to power up, just like the rings far below. So he stepped over to a wall which held the power console and tried to activate it, but to no use. With a curse he begun to search with his hand over the smooth surface above the console until he found the small crack and pushed his nails inside. With some difficulty he managed to remove the lid to reveal the dull orange backside of the drained potentia. If he was to gain access to the rest of the lab and open the window seals he would need power he didn't have.

After that he did a quick check of the room he had access to and found a tiny but much needed device. Essentially it was a neural interface which would update information already in his brain when he interfaced with their technology or the other way around. For example it would provide a much needed update of the gate network database in his head when he interacted with the diallers without him needing to memories it every time he dialled.

When he had emptied the lab he climbed down the hatch and sealed it behind him before he made his way back down to the dialler. Again sorting through the list of Alterran facilities he failed to find a single dialler which detected any energy signatures in the facilities they were installed in.

But when he looked outside the galaxy he did find what he was looking for. Half a dozen facilities of different kinds which all still had power, but he did not have the power to reach them and they did not have the power to reach him.

A quick glance at Atlantis new galaxy showed more activity than he had dared hope for. Atlantis herself was even highly active so the seeded on Terra must have had the power to dial there and according to the dialler they had done so only a few years ago. He was staggered by this as the dialler had no gate in close proximity. Still the gate would have to be there for them to reach Atlantis.


	3. Chapter 3

Picking a gate which hadn't been used in a long time he dialled it and stepped through the gate to the other side. Then he hurried up to the dialler and dialled Terra, just letting the gate lock before shutting it down and dialling it again. He wasn't about to risk his life not known what was on the other side. But at least the gate established a wormhole over and over again. After the eighth time he stepped away from the gate and sought cover between the nearby trees.

Inspecting his surroundings while he waited for a response he found the planet to have changed remarkably since the Alterrans had last visited. The large plains which had stretched across the area around the gate had been replaced by the trees and the area behind the gate had fallen several kilometers down or perhaps the gate was now standing on a raised plateau, either way he could see a giant forest stretching out behind the gate as an incoming wormhole arrived.

Coming down the slightly raised platform was the strangest of machines he'd seen. Clearly made of some grey metall the man long machine looked as sluggish as it moved when it came down the steps from the platform to the dialler. In an attempt not to scare it he distinguished himself from the trees and approached it from the end which had come through first, hopefully the front.

As he came closer a grey cube with a black circle spun around so the black circle was aimed at him. Talking in a calm voice he approached the machine and sat down right in front of it with a hand touching the side of the dialler, still with the black circle aimed at him. Seconds after he asked the machine for a representative he felt, through the dialler, that something had entered the other side of the wormhole and as the four packages arrived he shut it down and locked the gate from further use.

The four packages were two males and a female of the seeded plus a Jaffa, a first prime none the less. In a loud voice one of the men said something, possibly to him, while the Jaffa and female moved towards the forest. Possibly in response to the loud male the second male leaned in close to the loud one before walking up to him.

With a finger pointing at himself the man began to speak. " _My name is_ Daniel _."_ Then the man pointed his fingers at him. " _Can you tell me your name?"_ Did this man take him for a child?

Still he needed something from them. " _My name is_ Mokar _, formerly of the_ Jaffa _, now of the Alterra."_ That seemed to hit the man like the blast from a stunner. " _I require something from your people and offer to repair the clavis of your world in return."_

" _You are of the Ancients?"_ The man asked. Behind the man's eyes he could see the questions burning.

" _I am of the Alterran race, not some ancients."_ He declared. " _Now will you accept my offer?"_

From the edge of the cliff he heard the loud male and the female shouting something at them and as the male called Daniel replied he realised the mistake he'd made, they were of the seeded so like the Jaffa they would of course be talking the language of the seeded.

"Have oversight with my mistake Daniel, I did not realise your people talked the language of the seeded." He said and again Daniel looked shocked.

"You speak English?" Daniel asked.

"If that's what you call it, we call it the language of the seeded." He said. The language must of course have been given a name by its users. Something they hadn't done when they thought it to them. "Since you have given the language a name I presume you have given yourself a name?"

"We are humans, the humans from our planet are called Tau'ri, it means the first ones, or those from the first world." Daniel explained.

"But we came before you Daniel, we are the first. Humans as you call yourself would be the second, or third depending on if you count the servant race we created or not."

"We didn't name ourself the Goa'uld did, as a Jaffa you should know."

"Before my transformation to Alterran I was not aware that the rest of the galaxy existed or the true nature of the Chappa'ai, Astria Porta, gate or what you would call it."

"We call it a Stargate and the _clavis_ we call a DHD, a dial home device." Daniel continued his explanation.

"The DHD as you call if, of your world is drained and I offer to charge it if you give me the right materials and something I need."

"Yes, but how did you know that? It's in a secret facility under heavy guard."

"They are all linked together and an Alterran could diagnose anyone of them from another by touch. Your bodies, as my before, are not advanced enough to use this function."

"We have created our own DHD and use it for the gate so I'm not sure we have any use for the broken DHD."

"If you have created a true DHD then your races are more advanced than I have given you credit for Daniel."

"Erhm, we didn't build a DHD, we built a computer, a console if you will, like the one in Atlantis. Last I checked half of the signals given by the gate are ignored. I assume you know what Atlantis is?"

"Yes I do know what Atlantis is, it is good to see the city sprawling with life. Then you are still rather advanced are you not?"

"Yes we are one of the more advanced races in this galaxy, but you claim you can see Atlantis?"

"There are many things you seem to not know Daniel and I have already given you much more knowledge of our technology than I should have. Now I must ask you to accept my offer to you."

"I can not do that. I will need to speak to the leaders of my world. I think you would be most welcome, many have longed to talk to a living Anci...Alterran."

"I can not Daniel, you seem worthy and you show much respect, but I do not trust the rest of your people to be the same. I only contacted you because I need your help."

"You are afraid of getting trapped?" Daniel asked in disbelief. "You're an Alterran, you could do as you wanted, your kind once ruled the galaxy."

"At our height of power we ruled more than one galaxy Daniel, but now we're almost at our lowest point. I'm only one and should I be stopped we will be at our lowest again. Maybe later I will have the honor of returning to the former crown piece of our rule."

"How will you then repair the DHD?"

"You bring someone here I can teach and show, it's not overly complicated. We built them to be simple to use and maintain."

"What are you asking in return?"

"An energy source. I think you don't need to ask what I need that for?"

"I have a small energy source in this." Daniel said and held up a small metal cylinder with a clear cover in one end and then pointed to the machine. "The MALP has one too, but from what I know about Ancie…. Alterran technology it drew much more power."

"I would not need something to replace a Potentia."

"Potentia, potentia, pot...Oh right, we call them ZPMs, but we have nothing close to the power of a Potentia. We've search the galaxy for them but only found a handful. The closest we have are generators powered by the same material which you have used in the gates, but I do not think we will give you one."

"Bring the DHD and one of these generators here so I can examine it. If it gives off enough power for my needs I can give you what you need to figure out the other half of the feedback signals." His first thoughts of Daniel had quickly been shattered and he felt a trust building up to the man. "Stand up Daniel, I'm going to show you something."

Hesitating for a second Daniel stood up next to him. "Sure, what is it?"

Putting his hand on the red orb of the dialer he held up his hand towards Daniel. "I have never done this before so it might be confusing at first. Also don't try to move or the connection will break and you will feel pain." Then he touched Daniel's right temple and the other man's eyes rolled backwards.

From the side he saw the other three running towards them. "Release him." Shouted the loud man.

"Easy now." He said as he sorted through the list of gates in his head until he found the one he wanted and transmitted the images the sensor pack in the DHD provided into Daniel's mind. Then he held the transfer for a few seconds until he removed his left hand. "I hope you trust me now Daniel."

"That was amazing. Was that a live feed?" Daniel said enthusiastically.

"Yes, now I ask that you carry my message back with you. I trust this MALP of yours have a memory unit ."

"It does, but you will need this to interface with An..Alterran consoles." Daniel said as he opened a small hatch and withdrew a long wire from the compartment inside together with a small black box which he fitted to one end of the cable. "You should be able to download things through the cable onto this hard drive."

"When you return here with your answer, should you accept I will return this to you with the information about all the signals from the gate inside."

"That's a very pleasant way of asking us to get our asses of your planet." The female said as she and the male pointed something which could have been weapons at him and the Jaffa had his staff trained on him.

"Vala! Mitchell Teal'c, please make her shut up." Daniel snapped as he tried to dial the gate. "We'll return in two days with the answer."

"Allow me." Mokar said and put his hand on the orb of the DHD and dialed Terra.

"How come the thing didn't flush?" The loud man, Mitchell, asked as the wormhole was created.

"We've seen the Asgard do the same, so it's not surprising that the creators of the gates can do so too." Daniel said as he motioned for the others to get to the gate.

"Indeed." Teal'c said as they approached the gate. "Thor did use a device to create a similar wormhole for him and Colonel Carter to return to Ida."

"He's the short grey thing right?" The female asked as the four stepped through the gate.

On the other side of the gate a rather short man was waiting in his navy blue uniform. "So how did it go?"

"We made contact and he made some demands General." Mitchell said. "The normal evil guy things."

"Except for the fact that he's a living Ancient, or Alterran as he seemed to prefer, who asked for our help in exchange for fixing the DHD in Area 51 and giving us an explanation of the feedback signals the gate sends out. It could further improve the dialing computer." Daniel said.

"We'll have a debriefing in five minutes." The General said. "And I would very much like to know where you kids lost the MALP."

"Consider it an investment." Daniel said as the four walked down the ramp.

* * *

...

* * *

"I'm a con-artist so I know when I see one and that man is one." Vala said when they were seated in the briefing room five minutes later around the long table. The other three who'd come through the gate and the General all looked at her with disbelief.

"Care to tell me what really happened Colonel?" The General asked.

"From what I understand we seem to have stumbled upon an Ancient Sir."

"More like he stumbled upon us." Vala said.

"No no no, he knew about us. About our drained DHD and more. Hell he dialled in eight times just to get our attention." Daniel said.

"Still sounds like a con to me." Vala said.

"What about this deal or exchange you talked about?" The General asked.

"He wants one of our generators, in exchange he'll fix the DHD in Area 51 and show us all the signals the gate sends out." Daniel said.

"Absolutely not. If he tampers with it he's got a bomb."

"Sir, this I'll have to go through Homeworld Security." Mitchell reminded him. All trades with alien cultures had to be approved by them.

As Daniel continued to ramble on about what they could learn a white light flashed in the window to the General's office. "Somebody called?" A voice called out from the office as another man in navy blue uniform stepped out of there.

"General O'Neill. I didn't know you had been informed." The first General said.

"Landry. Oh, but a little bird sung in my ear." O'Neill said and held up his phone. "So I heard we're going to do some trading."

"We're not going to offer a Naquadah generator to someone we just meet." Landry shouted.

"No matter what you think about this General Landry the decision is mine. You are dismissed."

"This is outrageous." Landry shouted as he stormed out of the room.

"Don't worry, I'll keep him off your backs." O'Neill said as he slumped into the chair at the end of the table. "So thoughts about this? Vala?"

"He's clearly a fake. The Ancients or Altarons or whatever haven't been around for quite a few years." The lady replied. "Have they?"

"It's Alterran and no they haven't. But they did create libraries of knowledge which can be downloaded into the human brain, only it's usually lethal." Daniel said calmly.

"Oh." She said sliding deeper into the chair.

"Teal'c?" O'Neill asked.

"I am not certain O'Neill. He had the clothes of a Jaffa, but no mark and his skin was much too light in colour."

"Mitchell?"

"He seems harmless enough Sir. Still don't know if we should give him one of our generators Sir."

"Ok, thank you. Daniel stay, the rest of you can go." O'Neill said and waited for them to leave before he walked over to Daniel and sat down on the large table. "Talk to me Daniel, what do you really think?"

"I honestly think we have found a true Ancient, or Alterran as he prefered. I think we should take his offer."

"You think a DHD for a generator is a fair deal?"

"No, but this isn't about that Jack. If he's a true Alterran, and all proof points to him being one, then he could be the key to obtaining ZPMs."

"Daniel, he's asking us for power, I think if he had access to ZPMs he would use them instead."

"What if he needs the power to access them? He said that at the height of their power they ruled multiple galaxies, he might need the power to dial that galaxy and acquire the ZPMs. Either way this is good, this is a chance for us to get on his good side. The next time he needs something he will come to us and then we could be offered something of much more value." Daniel said as his enthusiasm grew for every word that came out of his mouth.

"You know we can't send you through the gate with one of those when we don't know what's on the other side."

"Come one Jack. This is a chance to good to be missed."

"If what you're saying is true then it is, but I'm not willing to risk our best team."

"So you're going to squander this chance?"

"No. When did you say the next meeting was suppose to be?"

"In two days time. Why what's happening?"

"Then we better tell Sam to hurry up and get the X-401 of the ground."

"You're sending a cargo ship as our backup?"

"Yes, Atlantis did pick up both the Apollo and the Sun Tzu on its way back to the Pegasus galaxy but they're both in bad shape and even with all the spare parts we sent with them it's going to take time to repair them I'm being told. The Daedalus is on on it's way back to Earth after ferrying Atlantis to Pegasus and the Hammond is already halfway there. Of course Odyssey is still on its mission. That only leaves the X-401 which, luckily for you, is due to make a test run this week."

"You won't regret this Jack." Daniel said as he rushed out of the room to prepare all the questions he had for the Alterran. Then he remembered what he'd been shown and popped his head back into the room.

"Yes Daniel?" O'Neill asked.

"He told me something, call it a proof of good fate or something. He claims that there's seven wraith ships heading for Atlantis. So you know, you might want to turn the Daedalus around again."

"Thank you Daniel." O'Neill said as he vanished in a white light.


	4. Chapter 4

He had been surprised by their willingness to listen to him. Even if it was only one of them who listened to him. Daniel, he would make sure to remember that name and the one the name belonged to. After they had left he locked down the gate and begun to pull apart this MALP they had left behind to reach its power source. The thing he finally concluded to be powering the machine seemed rather crude with its yellow outside and two wires poking out of it, but with any luck it would allow him to activate a console and write the feedback signal instructions in his head.

Deeming the rest of the device to be too primitive to be of any use he unlocked the gate and dialled back to the lab. Another long trek brought him back into the lab where he begun to separate a console from the rest of the systems to use as little power as possible from the power source. When he had severed all connections from the console to the rest of the lab he took the power source and begun to interface it.

The technology used in it seemed to closely resemble technology they had abandoned in favour of crystals many millions of years ago, but it still used the same kind of energy which ran through the crystals so he was hopeful he could get it going. To his relief the console powered up when he pressed the red wire to one part of the control crystal and the black wire to another.

Yet for all his relief the console showed it only had a few hours of power left so he had to get moving. Returning to the front of the console he immediately begun to move the information in his head straight into the console. Even with the advanced Alterran technology it took him five hours to download the information into the console with him simply standing there and thinking about it. Yet when he tried to move the information to the device given to him by Daniel he found that the device only fit the information for slightly more than one of the signals.

Quickly he looked through the memory of the console he deemed it sacrificable and returned to the interior of the console to get the memory unit. If the Tau'ri could download things from Alterran equipment to their own memory cores they should be able to download from the Alterran memory cores to their own equipment. With the core extracted from the console he put it in one of his pockets and sat down with his back to one of the consoles to think over his position.

He was a lone Alterran in Avalon, a galaxy which they had used mostly for experiments and their government, it had been the center of their empire and had relied on the other galaxies for materials and equipment. He needed to leave the galaxy and with any luck he could trade with the Tau'ri for a lift there, cause as far as he knew the only Alterran facility left standing which could be of any value in Avalon was the lab and three other places which all had problems according to the DHD. One was a place he could really use, a potentia factory, but sadly it was far from being completed. The second was a processing plant dedicated to the construction of Vis Uban, which was the third place, and that was far from completed. He could still have used the city as a base if he had the technology and resources to fortify it, but he would need drones, shield generators, plenty of potentias and most of all he would need help to man the city. As it stood he had nothing of that.

Then there was also the matter of Atlantis. Through the city's DHD he had learned many things about the situation even if the DHD offered only limited information. Still he had read on one of the Alterran consoles about the approaching Wraith fleet and their need for potentias to raise the city's shield. He was not in any position to help them, yet it was part of the duties that the repository had given to him.

Then there was the other three great races, the Furlings had been a dying race when the Alterra first retreated to Avalon and the DHDs in their galaxy reported no activity since the Alterra had fled from Atlantis, the DHD on the Nox world did not respond so it was probably destroyed. But at least he had heard about Asgard activity now, even if the DHDs in their galaxy reported the last activity there to be several years ago. But until he could contact the Asgard he would have to rely on the Tau'ri for aid, in exchange for knowledge.

Lastly was his personal situation. He had no power which was bad. His body was still changing to Alterran standards, while the most important changes had been made the godlike power part would take many months, possibly years, until it was completely done. He also lacked food and water even if his Alterran physiology did not require as much as a normal jaffa or human. Weapons and shields was also a problem for him, with those he could have raided some of the old Alterran ruins which the jaffa now occupied to full fill many of his needs, with his new knowledge of technology he could already pinpoint twenty or so smaller power generators on his old homeworld. Another future need was manpower, one man could probably build an empire, but one man would not be able to sustain that empire.

On the plus side he was alive. He was making contact with a seemingly friendly race. He had a lab he could use as a base which was good. On top of that he had three facilities which would need repairs or completion, but it was still better than starting over from nothing.

As he stood there thinking he came to think of something and he quickly pulled the power source from the console before he evacuated the lab and hurried down to the gate. Running by the DHD he stroked it with a hand to dial the gate and ran through it as the wormhole was established.

On the other side of the gate he was faced with compact darkness when the gate shut down behind him but after stumbling up to the DHD he established a wormhole back to the planet with the lab to get some light. To his left he could see the tunnel leading away to the pile of incoming materials and to his right another tunnel winded off to the end of the production line and the storage of outgoing goods. The blueprint in his head also told him the control room he was looking for was right in front of the gate through a door. Carefully he tried to force the door open but to no use as it was operated by the sensor next to the door. So he carefully released the cover of the sensor, took out the power pack and used it to power the sensor to release the lock so he could force the door open.

Inside the control room two big and two small consoles sat with dark screens. He knew the small one to the left in the room was connected to the intake of the facility, the large one on the far side of the room controlled the production in the entire facility and the small one to the right controlled the storage room and kept a count of everything in there. The last large console which pointed at the gate was used for communications and orders coming from the building site. It was the right console which had caused him to run like mad to the facility.

With the power pack he managed to get some power to the console, just enough to access the inventory records. Like he guessed when he had thought of how to power the facility again, the ZPMs driving the facility had not run out of power until many years after the last Alterran had abandoned the place. Some of the things supposedly stored in the facility made him almost droll. Clearly someone had ordered things from the facility not needed in Vis Uban, unless someone had changed the design from what was in his head to include more than a few DHDs and gates, a few plasma weapons exclusively used on capital ships, hyperdrives, infantry weapons and shields, beam weapons, cloning machines and ship based generators among other things.

Apart from the lack of potentias it was an almost perfect way of starting over for him. But it would have to lay there waiting for him just a while longer since he lacked the power to activate the lights in the facility and without them he did not even think about going there since the tunnel was suppose to only be traveled by hover sleighs even under normal operations and the best of times.

Before he had the time to get anything else out of the console it shut down and the screen turned black again. He could have used more power to explore the rest of the consoles but for now it would have to do. So with the power pack in hand he walked back to the active gate and stepped through it.

Back on Jobos he hurried back to the lab but once inside he found himself wondering what to do until his meeting. In the end he ended up sitting there waiting and feeling the changes happening in his body on a molecular level from the time the sun went down until it rose again which due to the orbit of the planet was well over eighteen hours. Then he begun his trek down to the gate and dialled the meeting planet.

Once there he begun to mess around with this MALP the Tau'ri had brought with them, he did not want to ruin it, but perhaps he could learn a thing or two from it. His decision to take it apart did not seem to sit well with the older man who came through the gate in front of Daniel and the Jaffa who said "Come on, those things cost a lot to buy."

Unless their technology was smaller than he had imagined it did not seem like they had chosen to accept the deal. "No DHD for me to fix? I guess you didn't like my offer then?" He asked Daniel as he approached the DHD.

"Hold on a minute." The old man said and positioned himself between Mokar and the DHD. "There's no need to leave just yet."

"I was not planning to leave old man. I am only locking the gate so we don't get any unwelcome visitors." He said as he stepped around the man and let his hand rest on the DHD. "Since you have come here without a generator for me or the DHD for me to fix I will assume you either have a counter offer for me or you are here to bring me back to Terra with force, something I do not think Daniel would be capable of allowing."

"We're certainly not here to force you anywhere Mokar." Daniel said as he approached while the Jaffa seemed to stand guard in the background.

"Daniel, the big boys are talking." The old man said with a hard look to Daniel, who stepped away, before turning back to him. "As you guess we have another offer for you, but the old offer still stands like you made it. We simply have a ship waiting for a signal from us to beam them both down here."

Dam, he had not expected them to bring a ship to this. "Then what are you waiting for? I am here and ready to hold up my part of the deal."

Someone of the three must have sent the signal because to the side he saw a bright light and the next second a female stood there with the DHD and held something, a black square, in her hand which still seemed rather small to be a generator. "We just needed to send the signal." The old man said with a smile which probably was suppose to mark superiority. "This is Colonel Samantha Carter, you will be instructing her on the repairs of the DHD."

"It's a true pleasure to meet you." Carter said as she approached with her hand in front of her.

Seeing Mokar's confusion at the gesture Daniel hurried up to them. "You're supposed to shake the hand, like this." Daniel joined his hand with Carter's and waved it slightly up and down. "It's a normal way of greeting on our world."

These Tau'ri certainly had developed many strange habits since the Alterran had left, none the less he grabbed her hand and shook it. "I would very much like to begin with the DHD now."

"Of course." She said as she hurried back and folded open the thing in her hand. "I will be recording this for the future if that's fine with you."

"That will be acceptable." He said and she hurried to put down the thing on the ground. "There is a much faster way to determine what is missing, but since I am the only Alterran that option is not for you and I will show you how to manually do it."

"General O'Neill does have the ATA gene needed to use your machines." She said motioning towards the old man.

"Then an Alterran or one of the servant race must have mated with the he is not an Alterran. So please be quiet and listen to what I say, since you are recording it I will only say it once." He said as he begun his long explanation of how to manually determine and restock empty substances.

Many long hours later he sealed the DHD back up and restarted it.

"You really did it." She said and looked in awe at the DHD.

"Yes, I could have done it much faster, but since you needed to learn we had to do it the hard way." He said as he diagnosed it for further problems. "Many of the DHDs in this galaxy are old and they may soon begin to lose power, I will not be able to charge them all on my own. That duty now lies with you."

"How will we know which DHDs have run out of power?" She asked as they walked over to the other three.

"That is one of the many feedback signals from the gate. When a DHD is starting to go low on power it starts sending out messages in the gate network so an Alterran can come and fill it up. Or at least that is how it is meant to work, in all the knowledge i have there is no case outside of a laboratory where a DHD have been drained. But I suspect the time for their first refill is drawing near."

"You're saying the whole network of gates could stop working any time?"

"I'm saying the DHD network could begin to shut down in a couple of years, the DHDs which aren't used will surely work for many millions of years to come, but those who are used many times each day will soon lose power." He said as they returned to the others and he turned to the old man he assumed was O'Neill. "I have given you a working DHD General O'Neill, I suggest you give me the generator or at least let me inspect it."

"That is not going to happen until you show us the data on the signals." O'Neill said.

"Come one Jack, he fixed the DHD like promised. It's not like he can take the generator and run." Daniel said from behind.

"Daniel's right Sir. The DHD is working as it should, it's not only working but we can study it and learn from it." Carter said. "We could probably create a cold fusion reactor from this, or how to transport huge amounts of energy without the use for cables."

"I do have the information about the signals here General." He said and handed Carter the Tau'ri memory unit. Clearly she was the most suited to confirm it. "Your memory core was however insufficient and only the information about one of the signals could be downloaded onto it. I will give you the rest when I have my generator."

"Carter." O'Neill said calmly as the female returned to her hand carried device which seemed to be some kind of console as she could connect the memory unit with the device.

"On it Sir." She replied as he heard clicks coming from her direction. Half a minute later she looked up from the device. "It seems to be solid Sir."

"Fine. Bring it down." O'Neill said seconds before Carter was gone in a bright light and then returned a short while later the same way with a large grey box at her feet. "Do your inspection, but don't try anything."

"I want this deal to succeed as much as you do General. You have materials and manpower, I have knowledge I'm sure you could use." He said as he walked up the the grey box that Carter was opening to reveal three spheres connected by two tubes. Now this looked much more like a generator to him, so he turned to Carter "How much power does it yield?"

"Enough to dial the gate. We're using a more powerful version to power our ships and if tuned correctly two of these would be able to power the control chairs in Atlantis and Antarctica." She replied with a smile. This was better than he could have hoped for and it didn't seem to use that much Naquadah to run. "In the current configuration we can expect one of these to last up to five years on a single Naquadah generator core." She continued as she picked up one of five small metal pieces which fit into the top of the generator.

"If what you say is true then it will fill my needs." He said as he lifted it up to feel the weight. It was not light, but if he got the production facility up and running he was sure he could fix that flaw with some of the Alterran materials and alloys. "This material, Naquadah as you call it, the material we built the gates from. It's not one I will have trouble finding, can the configuration be changed so the yield increases in exchange for life expectancy?"

"Of course. I'll need a few minutes but it's not too hard." She said as she begun to pull the generator apart. As her hands moved quickly to do the configuration his eyes moved even faster to memories just how she did it. He was not a scientist or something similar, but his Alterran knowledge allowed him to roughly understand and judge the design and the parts in it. It was not as crude as he would have thought it to be, but even he could judge several small points which could be improved upon, like switching from the cables and wires the Tau'ri seemed to prefer to the much better crystals or changing the generator to work on the resonance frequency of the Naquadah to increase the yield further. But these small things he would keep to himself, the Tau'ri were using the same generators for themselves it seemed and it would not do for his not to be more advanced. "There we go, I've increased the yield by five times, it won't last as long, maybe a year, but it'll still hold together."

"Thank you Colonel Carter." He said as they closed the box and he heaved it up on his shoulder. "General O'Neill, thank you for the generator, the rest of the information on the signals can be found on an Alterran memory unit I have placed inside your MALP."

As he placed his hand upon the DHD and dialled home he could see Daniel coming up to him. "Mokar, we still have another offer for you."

"So I've been told. But first I want to get the generator somewhere safe." He said as he walked up to the wormhole and let the generator pass through.

"Sir, I think we've tried to dial the planet he just sent the generator to but we failed to get a lock." Carter said from the DHD where she was looking at the symbols entered.

"Allow me." He said as he hurried down to the DHD to look through the logged dials. "Colonel Carter is correct General O'Neill, a little over three years ago there was an attempt to dial that world from Terra. But the DHD on your side did not reply when asked who was dialling and so the receiving DHD refused the wormhole."

"You're telling us the DHD knew there wasn't one of you guys at the controls so it didn't even tell it was there?" O'Neill asked.

"Yes, the DHDs have many functions beyond that of dialling another gate. Many of these functions are exclusively useable by Alterra, like me. Any attempts at overriding that part of the programming would result in the destruction of the DHD and possibly the gate depending on how much power the DHD can produce, at the moment the one I fixed will be able to do so." He said without hesitating. The last part he had made up but that they did not know.

"We'll try not to fiddle with it too much then. Won't we Carter?" O'Neill said looking at Carter.

"Yes Sir." Carter replied.

"You did say that you had another offer for me General O'Neill. Now that everything else is out of the way, maybe we could focus on that to keep the threats of imminent danger to a minimum?"

"Good thinking." O'Neill said as Carter handed him the portable console. After inserting a far smaller version of the Tau'ri memory unit on the console he handed it to Mokar.

When he saw the address he frozen. It was one all too familiar to him, yet he would have hoped to avoid or bury and destroy the evidence about its existence if he found any.


	5. Chapter 5

The screen showed the nine symbol address to one of their worst mistakes since allowing the Ori to gain power, if not their single worst mistake. "If you want information about what you will find on the other side of that gate I would advise you not to ask that question, I will not answer it. Only know that it is a mistake I plan to erase when I get the chance."

"It's a little too late to inform us about what you've hidden on the other side of that gate." O'Neill flared up. "We have people trapped on the other side without a way of returning home."

"Then you can only hope that they will die fast."

"Sorry, but that's not our way. We leave no man behind."

"There is nothing I can do for them. If I had the power to dial that gate I would not go there to rescue them or aid them. I want nothing to do with what's on the other side of that gate."

"Well guess what, we want something to do with it."

"Look, we only want to dial Destiny to send them aid." Daniel said as he stepped into the conversation.

"You say you already have people there, don't waste any more lives trying to aid them. I would suggest you tell their families they're dead and forget about them."

"We have found a certain, extremely rare, material. A variation of Naquada, it's…" Carter said.

"An isotope. I know what it is. I believe you call it Naquadria."

"You know about it?" Carter asked in surprise.

"Yes. When my and Daniel's minds were connected his subconscious mind forced certain information into mine. It's mostly linguistics."

"You stole things out of his head?" O'Neill shouted.

"I do not steal things General O'Neill, it was offered to me and I accepted."

"Jack, it doesn't matter, isn't it better that he knows what we're talking about?" Daniel said.

"Either way we have found a few planets which have cores of Naquadria, we've used one such planet to dial Destiny before. We've since lost the planet and if possible we would need another to send supplies so that they can find a way home."

"If you promise that the only reason you would aid them is so that they can return home then I might be able to provide you with the location of one such planet. They can not under any circumstances continue the journey for any longer than needed."

"What exactly could scare the Alterran enough that you wish to destroy the ship which we see as one of your most amazing achievements?" Daniel asked.

"Some things should stay buried Daniel, that ship was launched not by the Alterra as a race, even if I am sure the creator of the ship would like to claim so. The ship was sent against the will of the other Alterra to find the thing which separated the Ori from us, a way to rule over everything and everyone. Had we not been occupied by other matters I am sure that it would never have been built in the first place. The creator of the ship could have created another split in our society like the one between the Alterra and the Ori. He was deemed dangerous enough that we imprisoned him and banned him from Alterran space under the threat of execution should he return once he had served his time. It is the first and only time we have used such a punishment."

"That seems a little harsh just because he had a different opinion than the rest of you guys." O'Neill said.

"The last time we had such a large difference in opinions in our society entire planets were destroyed to their core, mind you, not the literary core but the actual core of the planet. Eighty percent of the population in the galaxy died. Now tell me, what would the leaders of your world have done if they knew that the worst crime committed on your planet was about to happen again?"

"Jack. Our government have punished people far harder for far less." Daniel said.

"I'm beginning to see a small point approaching on the horizon. But I still don't see why you need to destroy Destiny or stop her from making the journey."

"It's not something I can answer you clearly. I only know that after the ship was launched a small part of the signal it's tracking was decoded and whatever the researchers found the council ordered their lab and research destroyed. In the repository was a few prime directives which I'm forced to follow, one of which is the order to destroy that ship whether I like it or not General."

"So you're going to send a bomb through the gate to destroy that ship as soon as you can dial her?"

"That is the last of my prime directives so only when I have made sure all the others will be doable will I do that. Those other directives includes keeping Atlantis safe. So as long as the threat of the Wraith remains I do not think I will have the resources to execute that directive. It will give you a few years, perhaps more."

"What happens if you would fail in one of these directives?" Carter asked.

"There are secondary directives to cover that. I have many years of directives in my head, but do not mistake me for a robot. Apart from the primes I am only required to follow the laws of the council, until such a time that I can form a new council to change the laws."

"The sooner you give us the location of the planet we need the sooner we can get those people home and maybe if you're a good boy we'll do you a favour and destroy her for you." O'Neill said.

"You will have your planet General, but I will need more generators in return."

"A planet for a few generators hardly seems fair, the planet's already there but we have to make the generators by hand."

"The materials for the generator's already there too General and to my knowledge there are only three such planets in Avalon."

"Sir. The chance of finding one planet in the entire Milky Way isn't that great, it's likely none of us will live when we do if we start in one end of the galaxy and search systematically from there." Carter said.

"Well lucky us, he just told us there's three of them."

"Whatever information's in his head it's at least ten thousand years old. Given that we've blown up two that only leaves one. We're lucky if the last one hasn't been destroyed by someone else."

"They are very fragile aren't' they?" Mokar said. "Should the planet in Avalon no longer exist there are a few in the bordering galaxies, but I do not know what lies in wait there."

"Sir, we can waste manpower and resources for hundreds of years before we find the planet. We can make up the loss of generators in the time it'll take me to fly the ship back to Earth if we can get the coordinates for the planet." Carter said.

"Jack. This could be the thing that saves them, we can't put a price on their lives."

"Fine, you kids can have it your way." O'Neill said as he gave in. "Bring down three more for him."

"Thank you O'Neill, this will be remembered." Mokar said as three more grey boxes appeared close to the gate in a white flash.

"Just don't make me regret this deal." O'Neill said as he picked up the console Mokar had dropped in his surprise. "The location now please."

"Of course. The planet does not have a gate, as I would have already used it to dial another galaxy otherwise. But I can show you the address the planet would have used." He said as he pressed his palm onto the DHDs orb and six symbols lit up. "There you will find the planet you seek."

"Thank you." Daniel said as Mokar walked up to the gate which was still dialed to the lab and sent through the generators before he returned.

"A planet outside Avalon with a similar core can be found here." He said as he pressed his hand onto the orb of the DHD and seven symbols lit up. "If you truly wish to bring your people home the DHD will need to be close to the gate to connect the long wormhole to the gate."

"We've had people return from Destiny while the DHD was far away from the gate." Carter said.

"Then if you have already been able to bring people home why would you not save all of them?"

"We tried but the wormhole only allowed one person through. The others were stranded on an alien planet in the past due to a solar flare."

"Long ago we used the power of the stars to dial between galaxies, much like the ship supposedly does and we begun to install failsafes to avoid traveling in time, those failsafes are used in the DHDs, not the gates. There are failsafes against many things in the DHD, I would suggest you used them."

"You're saying we could use a star to dial Earth?"

"Not Earth. I do not have the original blueprints for the ship in my head, but the recreated ones I have suggests that the ship can not handle the power needed for such a long wormhole. It should however be able to create a wormhole long enough for the dialing gate to supply the rest of the power. But doing so is extremely dangerous, if you get it wrong a power surge could damage both gates."

"You've become awfully helpful all of a sudden." O'Neill said sceptically.

"The only reason I am wasting my time telling you this is so that you can destroy the ship when you're done, my primes more or less forces me to give you this information." Mokar said as he walked up to the gate. "But that is also all the information I can give you about the ship. I do hope that you will use the knowledge in the right way. When I get the chance that ship will be destroyed." Then he stepped through the gate, leaving them standing there.

On the other side of the gate the four generators waited patiently for him and just as the gate was about to shut down a small device he'd seen the other four wore in their ears tumbled through. As he reached down to put it in his ear he saw a small piece of paper with the writing, Use this to contact us the next time, attached to it before the wind caught it and blew it away.

He had gotten what he had asked for and more, still he was not satisfied. He would need to find a way to keep the Tau'ri in place or they would be in his way in the future. Still it would have to wait until he could do something about it, at the moment all his concentration would need to be focused on his current task of getting one of the generators up the steep cliff side to the lab. It was not without risks, that he knew, but he did not have a choice, so he took up the closest generator and put it on his shoulder before he begun the trek upwards, hopefully for the last time.

Three and a half hour later he was pushing the generator into the lab. It had been exhausting even for his Alterran body to balance it on his shoulder up there but it was with relief he took out the generator from the box and hooked it up to the console he had isolated before. The screen told him it was working on low power, but until he could secure some potentias it would have to do. When he was satisfied with the safety of his jury rigged power source he began to plug the console back into the rest of the lab. The simple relief of having power increased further as the doors begun to open for him when he approached.

The lab was only composed of the control room and two proper labs. But as he entered one of the labs he could see a dozen stasis pods sitting around the room. They were all active, but as he took a few steps into the room to inspect them closer he stepped right into a force field which blocked his approach to the pods. Without a second though he walked back to the control room and made sure the doors stayed open after he walked through them. In the control room he turned of the generator and hurried back to the lab. He did not need to feel the force field against his hands to know that it was still active, the unmistakable faint and dull glow of an almost drained potentia in the pitch black room was all he needed to see to know that it had a separate power source which had been added after someone had made the blueprints now found in his head.

With curses in Alterran, Goa'uld and English flowing from his mouth he dragged himself back to the control room. In the control room he restored the power and begun his search through the labs database for a way to deactivate the forcefield. Many hours later he gave up his efforts, it seemed he would need a code to deactivate the shield, but through the records of the lab he found out that at least seven of the pods contained members of the servant species and the rest contained something else. The instruments in the lab also confirmed that ten of the pods had managed to keep their subjects alive since their freezing before the plague.

Here he was with a temporary solution to his lack of manpower, yet he was not able to grasp the solution in his hand. But at least he had the power he would need for now. He would need something to drain the forcefield, with any luck he could create something like that with the production facility. So he stepped into the center of the lab were the rings resided and activated them.

To his relief they came down through the roof and transported him down to the gate, were the rings disappeared beneath the soil. The three generators still stood at the gate ready for him when he dialled the gate to the processing facility. After pushing all three through the gate he stepped through it himself before it closed behind him.


	6. Chapter 6

Again he was greeted by compact darkness when the gate shut down behind him and he fumbled around the room until he found the DHD and dialled the gate to get some light. Then he proceeded to get one of the generators into the control room and plugging it into the console he had used before. When he plugged it in he saw the consoles in the room coming to life and through both windows he could see the internal lights illuminating the facility. When he heard equipment starting to move far away, deep into the facility, he moved to the console which controlled production and paused the production. He had power, but he would not waste the materials he had on creating a city for himself, at least not yet.

The console controlling incoming reported most basic materials to be in abundance while some rare substances, like Naquadah, was lacking. The console which controlled the production in the facility showed that it was processing mostly building materials, but here and there in the cue someone had inserted the odd component, a hyperdrive here, a plasma cannon there and some other things in between.

The console which controlled the use of the gate however was much more interesting. It showed that four hover sleighs awaited permission to come through the gate. But he would let them wait since he didn't have the power to retrieve them. It did however show that some of the mining operations they had created were still standing. They would surely serve him well when he could establish a working infrastructure.

For now they had to wait as he left the control room and walked down the tunnel to the outgoing goods storage. With the lights now working he could see down the tunnel and the reason they used hover sleighs, the tunnel was simply holes in the walls of the facility with a thin walkway going between them.

The first step onto the walkway felt all too familiar to the trials he had endured. It creaked and swung but he hurried over to the other side to avoid putting more stress on it than he had to. Beneath him he could see machines packed closely together and force fields running between them to guide the pieces into the next machine.

It took him several minutes to cross to the other side but once there he came up to the large doors which led into the four storage rooms where finished goods were placed. Next to each door a console used to manually recover things from storage sat. When used the console would activate machinery inside the vault which would collect the storaged part and place it in a container which would slide through the wall so the user could pick it up.

Strangely enough the container leading to the class four vault, the vault used to hold the most dangerous things that should not be handled by anything living, was open. Class three vaults held the dangerous thing they'd needed to be careful with, like weapons, bombs and similar things. Class two held all other devices while class one vaults held things like building materials and other things that no one used directly.

Still all four vaults had the same console to manually take things out of them if needed. In the container by vault four lay a small black box with a silver emblem stamped into the front in the form of a circle with several spikes pointing outwards in a fashion that made it feel like it was three dimensional.

The box however did not belong in the class four vault, it was dangerous in the wrong hands, but in the hands of a machine it was useless. Still it would not have come from this facility, it was not designed to build the content inside the box. Only a few dozen labs in the Alterran domain had been approved to produce it due to the risk it involved so this find was valuable beyond imagination.

As careful as he could he lifted the ornate box out of the container and placed it close to the walkway. Then he proceeded to withdraw a personal shield and a stunner gun from the third class vault. Now he could hopefully scavenge some things from the Alterran ruins the Jaffa had taken for themselves.

From the second class vault he also retrieved a bag along with some supplies. For a facility meant to build their newest city the facility sure had created many things meant for war over the years. With a steady hand he put the black box into the bottom of the bag, careful not to damage the seal that kept the content inside. Then he slid the shield beneath his shirt to hide it and put the gun inside his waistband before carefully moving back to the gate room.

There he carefully placed the bag on the floor and searched out the potentia factory through the DHD. The DHD of the potentia factory reported vacuum, but no direct or indirect exposures to space. The equipment controlling the building process seemed to be located just beyond the DHD and the DHD reported it to be intact.

Even to an Alterran exposure to space was definitely not healthy, but he would remain conscious for at least five minutes if he was careful, held his breath and made sure the shield would protect his precious air. With determination he put the generator right in front of the gate before he went to the control room to prepare the facility to be linked with the construction equipment on the potentia factory so it could send a list of required parts to the processing plant.

When all the preparations were complete he dialled the gate to the potentia factory and calculated the path of exit before taking the generator in his arms, taking a deep breath and configuring the shield. Then he stepped through into the vacuum of the gravityless room on the other side.

His trajectory sent him flying towards the DHD which he managed to catch with his foot. Thankfully a majestic glass ceiling opened up to the star the factory orbited to give him plenty of light. To better align himself for the next flight he pulled himself so that he was lying on top of the DHD, then he pushed off and the input console of the equipment begun to grow bigger in front of him, still the maneuver had cost him a minute.

Once at the console he begun to search for the second potentia socket, which was meant to be used when the first potentia ran dry during long and big projects. It took him well over two minutes to find the socket and as he pried open the panel and begun to connect the generator to the equipment he felt the oxygen in his blood diminishing. When the generator begun feeding power into the equipment he felt the artificial gravity activate and the air in his lungs mixed slightly as he fell a few centimeters onto the equipment, enough to let new oxygen come into contact with the walls of his lungs.

With what little oxygen he had left in him he got onto his feet and hurried over to the gate, gracing the orb of the DHD to dial it with one hand as he past it. As his feet found their way onto the three steps up to the gate one of his feet caught the upper edge of one and he fell head first into the gate.

With a thought the shields configuration changed and he felt the wet kiss of green grass on his face as he slipped through the gate and onto the ground. His thoughts of home when he dialled the gate had brought him to the lab and high above on the cliff face he could see lights shining from the lab out into the darkening landscape. Still before he could return to the lab to deal with the forcefield and possibly sleep for a few hours he needed to finish the startup of the equipment.

For a few minutes he lay there with his face buried into the grass to recover his breath, then he got up and dialled the gate back to the processing facility. There he knelt down by the box and pressed his hand to the silver colored symbol. With a thought he broke the seal of the box and hoped the shield would protect him if the content inside had escaped from the containers over the years. With a steady hand he removed the lid of the box and saw the five vials inside to be intact, still containing the grey powder.

Still careful not to break the vials he picked two of them up, put the lid back on the box and sealed it again. Normally a full box would be used, but as far as he knew they were the only five vials left in existence so he would save the others until a time when he needed them. With the two vials in his hand he dialled the potentia factory and prepared himself before stepping through.

This time there was no flying involved as he came through the gate, instead the artificial gravity made sure he could get to the console much easier. Still he was on the clock as he powered up the equipment which consisted of the core which controlled the building process and three console which controlled different things, one large and two small.

On either side of the core two pillars stood. With a wave of his hand over the top of one pillar a panel with a rack full of vials came out of it. To no surprise all twelve of them were empty, so he quickly replaced two of them and closed it. With the touch of a few buttons he activated the shield meant to contain the construction site, it was weak but as long as nothing too bad happened it would hold. With some more button pressing he released the content of the vials into the construction area and saw a cloud of grey particles float away from him.

With the final preparations done he hurried back to the gate and dialled it back to the processing facility. He still had a minute or two of air, but there was nothing more for him to do here for now, so he stepped through it.

Back in the processing facility the console for incoming and outgoing goods showed an extensive list of goods required to finish the building of the potentia factory, still it was far less than he would have thought. With the tap of a few buttons he ordered the facility to prioritize the items needed while another set of buttons powered up one of the waiting hover sleighs which waited in the bowels of the facility while slaving it to the building equipment so he did not have to carry anything himself.

The construction console showed a forty week deadline until it had constructed all the pieces necessary to complete the potentia factory. Then it would probably take some time for them to be installed. But he had a few things to do meanwhile.

After a quick tour to the lab planet to recover the last generator he walked through the control room and a maintenance door into the actual production facility with the generator flung onto his shoulder. On instinct he moved towards a nearby staircase and moved down eight levels to the only lab in the facility.

After packing up the generator he placed it on the single workbench which sat against one of the walls. As he stepped away from the bench a force field formed around the generator. Slowly a holographic representation of the generator was built up from one side to the other.

With his hands he begun to pull apart the hologram into the most basic components in an effort to figure out the inner workings of the generator. Using simulation modules not in many millions of years before the creation of the facility he begun to understand the function of each circuit board.

When he thought he understood the generator he begun to create control crystals to replace the circuit boards and changed the primitive Tau'ri materials to more advanced Alterran materials. What it left him with was far too large for him even if its weight was far less, so he pulled it apart again and sized it down to fit into the potentia sockets. With the current configuration he had cut down its power yield significantly, but he when he changed the low quality Tau'ri Naquadah for the much higher quality Alterran version the yield increased almost ten fold compared to the original design even if it would burn out much faster.

Until someone more proficient in technology could look at it the new design would have to do. It was not the potentia they had relied on for many millions of years, but it would be sufficient for much of his simpler needs. Using the console in the room he saved the design into the database of the facility and shut down the rest of the lab before taking the generator with him.

Once back in the control room he ordered the facility to create ten of them as soon as possible, even prioritising them before the pieces of the potentia factory. Even with the limited power supplied by the two Tau'ri generators which were now plugged into the facility they were simple and cheap to create for the facility. Then he went back to the lab to rest and eat.

A few hours later he was back in the processing facility and collected the one generator that had been completed so far. With the generator in one hand he entered the control room and slid the other hand over one of the walls. On the wall a cover swung open to allow access to the four potentias which normally powered the facility. After removing the four drained potentias he inserted the new generator before closing the cover again. The new power source would significantly increase the number of machines operating at the same time.

With a while left until the next one was complete he headed over to the DHD and searched through his mental list of all planets the Ancient had constructed something on for one to raid for supplies. The one he decided to go for held two labs which they had used to experiment with transportation technology. It was here they had developed the transporters used on Atlantis and later their limited beam transports.


	7. Chapter 7

The gate on the planet was guarded by two dozen Jaffa. Still he saw that as no problem. With one hand still on the DHD Mokar drew the stunner and dialled the gate. Not surprisingly the Jaffa raised their staffs and pointed them at the gate in response. But that did not do them any good as he begun to take potshots through the gate at them. It took him a few tries before he hit anyone, but after refining his aim slightly his blue stunner bolts slammed into the Jaffa and decimated their numbers so that when he finally stepped through the gate he only had to stun the two Jaffa hiding behind the DHD in a rather unspectacular way. Two extra bolts shoot into each Jaffa would ensure they stayed knocked out while he relieved them of their equipment.

After sending back the equipment to the processing facility he paused to look at the planet. Here too he could see the changes time had had on the galaxy since they had ruled it. The vast ocean which should have stretched out to his left was now only a salt bed where the Jaffa seemed to have set up camp and the forests and fertile plains to his right had left way to a massive desert. The only thing that seemed to remain the same was the two Alterran labs sitting on either side of a salty bay.

Change had usually been seen as good within Alterran society but these changes scared him. In truth the galaxy did not seem to be the same place they had left so long ago. The creator of the trials had never thought that it would take so long for a worthy human to complete them so he had failed to take these kind of things into account. Yet here he was, a semi evolved Alterran with all their knowledge, soon he would have all the powers of an Alterran at the brink of ascension. But for all his knowledge and power he had no idea of the current state of affairs in the galaxy. For all he knew the Tau'ri could control the entire galaxy or some other faction could have enslaved a better part of it. He would need to find a reliable source of information and he would also need to map out their galaxies once more.

An explosion from one of the labs ripped him from his thoughts. It was the lab furthest away which seemed to be under attack, but he could see the defensive shield protecting it from the blasts, that meant it had power. With any luck the other lab which he now rushed to had power left too, something the door which opened to allow him inside confirmed. The inside of the lab was almost identical to the stasis lab, but he was only interested in the potentias that powered the two labs. In the floor of the lab he saw the rings leading to the other lab. Using them he was transported there and felt another blast shake the lab.

Walking up to the potentia he waved his hand in front of it and it slid out of its socket. Its very dull glow told him all he needed to know, it was almost drained, to the point that his new Naquadah generators would give of more power than he could get out of it. It was to no use for him in its current state, so walking up to the main console he activated the self destruct to make sure the technology inside did not fall into Jaffa hands. Then he ringed back to the first lab. The potentia here barely contain more power, but it would be enough for him to dial another galaxy once, maybe twice.

He did not hesitate for a second when he reached out and took the potentia from the socket. With the potentia in one hand and the stunner in the other he hurried out of the lab and rushed for all he was worth back to the gate. Upon reaching the DHD he threw a look over his shoulder and saw the second lab explode. Even with the small amounts of power left in the potentia the initial blast vaporised both labs and sent a shock wave rolling over the surface of the planet. But he had enough of a head start that he could slip through the gate without worrying about the explosion following him through the gate.

When he arrived back in the processing facility he placed the potentia next to the black box of vials, he would need it again soon. While he was gone the increase in available power had allowed the facility to complete two more of the generators which he collected before withdrawing the third now powering the facility. Swiping his hand over a section of the DHD he made it slid out to allow for an external power source to be connected, it was far from a pretty set up, unlike most Alterran devices, but it did allow him to hook up the potentia to the DHD to establish an intergalactic wormhole.

After making sure the power flow into the capacitors of the DHD was correct he opened a wormhole to Atlantis. Through the earpiece given to him he heard dozen of voices screaming and shouting in panic. Manually he entered the override code imprinted into his mind onto the DHD and checked through the DHD to make sure the shield had been lowered properly.

On the other side of the gate, in Atlantis, he saw a man shouting from the top of his lungs at the people around him and another man furiously tapping on one of the Tau'ri consoles.

Still with one hand on the DHD he picked up the three generators and lobbed them through the gate one by one.

The panic on the other side was immediate as the eight men who had taken up positions in front of the gate with their weapons raised ran to cover as if their life depended on it. Still a minute or two after the gate had shut down they remained behind cover. Then the console tapper and the yeller came down the staircase and the tapper seemed to understand what he had actually sent them, after some tinkering.

Even though the DHD detected several Wraith in the vicinity he removed his hand from the DHD, he had done enough to satisfy the prime directive to protect Atlantis so it let him return to doing what he wanted.

With only the two Tau'ri generators feeding the facility with power and the one potentia he had drained it would take two or three more hours before the next generator would be complete. That gave him some time to tinker with the equipment he had stolen from the Jaffa, which he had probably then killed with the selfdestruct. Either way he took the equipment and headed back to the lab where he begun to pull apart the staffs and Zat'nik'tels into their basic components. The most easy way to drain a shield, if you did not want to destroy everything inside, was to deplete the power source, something which would take time considering it now was a potentia.

After many hours of tinkering he had improvised a sort of anti shield pulse generator using the liquid Naquadah cells to run negative energy through the Zat'nik'tels, which he had modified to transmit the same energy the shield generators did into the staffs to produce a field in front of each staff that would hopefully drain the potentia powering the shield much faster, even if it could still take a few years and he likely had to replaced the liquid Naquadah cells a few times.

Using the armours he had also stolen he rigged the staffs right in front of the shield and powered up his makeshift device. It did have sparks flying of it, but it still seemed to work as he saw some key components glow and pulse. Luckily for him the Alterra had not been big on internal decoration so he did not think he needed to worry about the sparks.

With nothing left to do he found himself sitting down in the control room of the lab and taking a bite of a ration pack. When he finished the meal the threw the empty pack into a corner and put his back against the wall to close his eyes for a while.

When he woke up he checked on his anti shield pulser, but as expected the shield was still operational. With nothing else to do he collected the five finished generators that had been completed and installed four in the processing facility. The fifth he took to the potentia factory and installed it in the first potentia slot, the second slot would get the next one and lastly the lab would be given its own generator.

While waiting for the potentia factory to be finished he spent his days reading through the log of the head researcher of the lab. According to the log they had attempted to create a stasis pod that conserved a person exactly like they entered the pod using time dilation fields. This was why the potentia was there, to power the field and the pods.

After six days he grew tired of the logs and headed down to the gate and the DHD. Through the DHD he took a look at the potentia factory, it seemed the hover sleight had just arrived there, so it clearly was not finished yet.

Out of boredom he begun to look through the planets they had settled in the past for anything to waste his time on. On a planet once called Eheidrilles the DHD detected what seemed to be a small camp a hundred or so meters into the dense undergrowth of the planet. The Alterra had settled the planet and built one of their largest cities there, but when the plague struck it had been wiped out in a matter of months. Now only ruins remained and it was inside one of these ruins the camp seemed to be located.

What peaked his interest was not the camp but the four humans who approached the camp from the gate with weapons raised, the same weapons the Tau'ri had wielded when meeting him. The fifth man who seemed to be sneaking out of the camp on the other side did not have any weapons according to the sensors, but he seemed to have the same clothes as the Tau'ri he had meet and some additional green goo painted on his face. If he was the owner of the camp he did not seem to need a weapon though as a branch swung into the four men's path and one of the lifesigns blinked out. This seemed to make the three surviving men a bit more careful because they slowed down considerably.

Despite their carefulness the attackers lost another man to a crumbling wall when they came into the camp. The noise must have warned the owner because he increased his pace from sneaking to jogging. When the attackers pulled their second dead man lose the DHD detected a weak EM signal coming from the attackers at the same time as his earpiece begun to crackle. In the next ten seconds over twenty similar signals came from outside the DHD's sensor range and half a minute later eight more four man groups came within range, some of the groups seemed to carry or drag some men who showed no lifesigns.

At the far edge of the sensor range he also saw the camper approach the gate from the side opposite of the camp with two groups right behind him after he had lost track of him for a while. The crackling in his earpiece continued as the EM signals seemed to become constant.

The camper was only a few meters from the DHD when one of the attackers fired his weapon and the camper appeared to have been hit in his left leg even if the sensors failed to detect any energy travelling between the weapon and the camper. With only one working leg the camper managed to stumble the last distance and fall onto the DHD where he begun to dial the gate. Before the gate could form a wormhole the attackers had caught up to the camper and dragged him away from the gate into the forest.

The dense foliage the attackers pulled the camper into was surprisingly thick, enough so that the sensors failed to make out what happened next but when the groups returned to the gate with EM signals flowing from them the camper was still inside the foliage and his lifesign was growing weaker by the second.

It took less than two minutes for all the attackers to gather at the gate, dial it to Terra and after a last EM signal they all stepped through the gate.

Less than five seconds after the attackers had left the gate activated again and Mokar stepped through. He headed into the forest towards the camper straight away and after some searching in the thick bushes he found the man. The camper seemed to have one deep puncture wound in each leg and each arm and the pool of blood beneath the man was growing at a rapid pace. He was unsure if his healing powers had developed as planned yet, but he would soon find out he thought as he carried the man out of the forest to the gate.

At the gate he put the man down to examine the wounds, inside he found small metal splinters which should not be there. If the Tau'ri used primitive projectile weapons it would explain why the sensors failed to pick up the projectiles. It did make it a bit harder as he had to dig out the metal by hand before he put his hand over the first wound and concentrated on healing it like the information in his head told him to. To his relief he felt a warm feeling in his hand and he could see a glow beneath it.

After a while he lifted his hand and the wound had thankfully closed beneath it, then he moved on to the other three in a similar manner. When he was starting on the the last wound he saw his field of vision darkening, yet he kept going until it all went black and he slipped from consciousness.


	8. Chapter 8

When he regained consciousness he saw that the man was still lying face down right next to him. After checking that all the wounds had closed properly he threw the man onto his shoulder and walked over to a small stream the DHD had detected.

There he laid the man down and watched the blood wash out of the green uniform and the green and black stuff on his face cleared to reveal a man he had meet in a much better shape not long ago.

The face of General O'Neill was not what he had expected when the brown and green face mask washed of. The water seemed to have some effect on the General who begun to squirm in his arms.

"Easy General." He said when the former tried to escape and he had to hold him down. "You're kind of safe now."

"What do you mean by kind of safe? Either you're safe or you're not! And I've just been hunted down by a bloody death squad." At least there did not seem to be anything wrong with the man's lungs, if his loud tone was anything to go by.

"Well they should believe you are dead General, they did leave you in the bushes with some nasty wounds. I found some metal pieces which I think are the cause of the wounds." He said as he helped O'Neill up on his feet. "We should probably get moving in case they come back to collect your body."

"I doubt they will, I have too much power for them to show my dead, cold, body. They'll write me off as missing in action." O'Neill said as he walked towards his camp.

"We should still get moving, unless you're waiting for someone. Or is there something of value on this world that I am not aware of?" He said as they avoided a rather fancy fall trap.

"No, but I'd like to get the few things I managed to bring with me." O'Neill said as he begun to push things lying around into a bag. "I might have been ready to abandon it all, but now when I have to chance to take it with me I plan to do so. Unless you plan to put a bullet in me that is?"

"Firstly I don't know what a bullet is and secondly I can probably replace anything you've lost." He sat as O'Neill pushed a fluffy bag into his face.

"Those metal things you pulled out of me are the remains of a bullet, we load them in weapons and the weapon launch them at high speeds so we can kill each other. I had a pistol which I lost a few planets ago, if I'd still had it I'd show you how it works." O'Neill said as he threw the bag onto his shoulder and headed back towards the gate.

"So care to tell me what happened General? I watched through the DHD and even if the clothes and equipment were different from the ones used by you when we traded they used the same weapons as you. I thought you were an important Tau'ri?" He said as they walked through the forest.

"I'll tell you as soon as we're in a safe place, I take it you've got some sort of an Ancient base?"

"It's a lab, but yes I do use it as a base." He said as he touched the DHD and dialled Jobos. "It's probably the safest place for you at the moment, unless one of your friends give away the address and they come by ship."

"The only ship they'll have access to is the X-401 but it will be busy transporting materials to and from the new Icarus base. What you told us about Destiny only made our leaders want the ship more." O'Neill said as he stepped up to the gate which activated without the unstable vortex. "You've got to teach me how to do that with the gate."

"They can not stay on that ship General, I will find a way to destroy it" he said and ignored the request.

"Fine with me, as long as we get our people of the ship. But how do you do that with the gate?"

"I don't need to clear the other side if I know what's on the other side, so I tell the gate not to."

"That's what the kawoosh is for? I guess we've used it in the right way a few times then. But how can you do it then? I don't see you using any technology to do it." O'Neill said as he looked at the gate.

"I guess there's no use hiding anything from you General since I guess you are stuck with me now. I can look through the dialers, the DHDs as you call them, using the sensors installed in them. In other words I know what is on the other side of all the gates, unless someone moves the DHD away from the gate, therefore I don't need the blast unless something is in the way. On the other hand we have no way of knowing if you know what's on the other end, so both gates send out a blast just to be sure." He said as he walked over to the covered rings. "Up there is the lab I where I spend my nights."

"That's a long and dangerous walk, it would be easy to fortify. I like it. What was your name again?"

"My name is Mokar and we will not be walking there General." He said as he held out his hand vertical in front of him to show it was his doing when the rings rose out of the ground and surrounded them.

"This room is rather cramped isn't it? Is there another room I can take or do we have to share?" O'Neill asked as they stepped out of the rings.

"There is another, proper, lab down the hall. It's the right door, don't take the left one, there's some equipment behind the left door which is sending out quite a few sparks. You should probably stay away from it."

"I'll just take a quick look before I go to bed. My head feels like it's going to explode."

"Just be carefull General, I will have my uses for you soon and you will not be of any use to me dead."

"I'm not sure I'd like to help you Mokar. I just want to get my planet back from the Goa'uld."

"If you help me I am sure we can reclaim Terra from the Goa'uld. In time however you might find that when the number of Alterra grow we might want to reclaim Terra ourselves."

"You would drive the humans, your children, from their home world?"

"Never. We would rule the planet so that we all could exist side by side, so that we could be a guiding hand for you as you entered the galaxy, O'Neill, and space beyond."

"In case you haven't noticed Mokar, we're already out here, we have bases in another galaxy we call Pegasus and we've visited several others, not including the ones visited by our people on Destiny."

"That was not what I meant General, I have seen parts of your planet through the DHD and it would seem that you are still rather primitive, I happened to watch through your DHD as it traveled through a city and I didn't detect a single thing which points to you being as advanced as you claim."

"We're advanced, the gate has brought us forward several hundred years in time in the last fifteen years, technology wise. We just haven't had the time to give the public everything yet."

"And that is where I come in General. We wished to be here to guide you, we hoped that the repositories would spawn an Alterran much sooner to guide you and the galaxy when the plague was no more. When we claim Terra again we will show you the galaxy, the good things and the bad. Our technology, your numbers and our leadership."

"You think the people of Earth would just bow down when some alien comes barging in and claim they ruled millions of years ago?"

"Absolutely not General, but i surely think you already have power structures in place which we can use. If I introduce some technology to your planet I am sure I can gain power and grow it from there."

"You're an evil bastard you know, but you can't be worse than Kinsey. If you help me get rid of him you'll have my allegiance, that's a promise. For whatever it's worth."

"Who's this Kinsey?"

"He's a disgusting little man who's worked against me since we first used the gate. He's against all things alien. I'm sure he's the one who tried to have me killed."

"Please General, start from the beginning."

"My head's pounding too much Mokar. Tomorrow I'll tell you everything." O'Neill said as he took his stuff and headed down the corridor. When he reached the two doors he opened the left one and jumped backwards. "There's quite the firework in here."

"I'll try to get it sorted out some day." Mokar said dismissively as he slumped down against the wall. He was conscious, but he was still drained by the healing he'd done to O'Neill and it would most likely be a few days until he was back to full strength. Had he found O'Neill a few days earlier his attempt at healing him could have killed them both.

The morning after he awoke to heavy footsteps and automatically he drew the stunner to aim it in the direction of the sound. When his eyes woke up enough to sharpen his vision he saw O'Neill standing a few steps into the corridor with his hands in the air.

With one hand he motioned for the man to approach while he returned his stunner to its resting place. "I'm not used to having people around General."

"It's cool, at least you didn't shoot me."

"Are you hungry?" He said as he pulled up two rations from the bag he carried.

"Well I've never turned down food." O'Neill said as he snatched both packs and sat down on the other side of the room. "These aren't too different from what we eat out in the field back home."

"Then I hope you like it General, because that is the only kind of food I have access to."

"It'll do just fine Mokar and please call me O'Neill or Jack or anything but General please."

"Very well O'Neill." He said as he took up a pack for himself and they ate in silence. Only when O'Neill had followed Mokar's example of throwing the trash in the corner did they speak again. "I believe you had a story to tell O'Neill."

"I know. I just don't know where to start." The man said and leaned his back against the wall. "A little over ten years ago a man named Robert Kinsey was elected Vice President of the United States of America. Before being elected he'd tried to stop us from going through the gate many times, but each time he was stopped. After this he tried again but was stopped during an alien invasion. A year lat… You do know what a year is right?"

"Yes O'Neill I do know that. But there were many other words Daniel's mind did not tell me of."

"Like what?"

"It would be easier if you would allow me to link our minds and recover the knowledge from your mind."

"There's a lot of private things in my head Mokar."

"Then show that you trust me O'Neill and I will show you the same trust. I will only look at the knowledge of the words in your mind."

"What would you offer in return?"

"I will entrust you with the knowledge of the facilities I have under my command."

"Fine, but only the words, nothing else."

"That I promise O'Neill." He said as he moved over to O'Neill and placed his hands on the temples of the man for a minute. Then he removed them and returned to his wall. "Your language is rich in words, but I do think I understand it now."

"Good, I guess. Back to the story. About a year later he was taken as a host by the Goa'uld and never seen again. Everyone thought he was dead, at least until a week ago. I'm not really sure about how it works, but the current President died a while back, so the election was moved a year, to this year.

Anyway I was sitting in my couch watching the tv after a day in the SGC and there he was, being presented as the new President. He'd been on the SGC's wish list of bad guys so I made a call to the Commander of the SGC, a man called Henry Landry. He's a hard but fair man. Instead of him I heard a man with a chinese accent answer the phone and I knew something was wrong. The fact that my door was blown off its hinges half a second later sort of confirmed that. Luckily I always keep a few Zats hidden inside and outside my house just in case, there's been more than a few break ins.

So I dropped the two intruders and searched them for some sort of ID, the only thing I found were two NID badges. It's an organisation which have allied with Kinsey before, but we shut it down at the same time Kinsey disappeared, or at least we thought so. Either way I got into my car and drove towards the SGC while I tried to contact Carter, Daniel and pretty much everyone else in the base.

When I got to the SGC I stopped a few kilometers from the entrance and used an emergency hatch to get into the base. Inside the base I managed to sneak into the locker room and steal this uniform and a cap, which I lost two days ago.

Daniel's room was the closest one so I headed there first. Outside his door they'd stationed two guards, but I don't think they expected me to be inside the base, cause I could walk up to them and shoot them from point blank range. Daniel must have heard what was going on, cause when I entered the room he was standing behind the door ready to smack a chair into my head. Luckily he didn't when he saw me.

Then he told me how the base had been flooded with some kind of gas. We'd built the base to keep things coming through the gate away from the surface, not the other way around. When he'd woken up he'd been lying in his quarters, on his bed, and the guards outside had refused to reply to his questions. So we dragged the guards inside and searched them, of course they had nothing on them. The insignia on their uniforms wasn't something we recognised either, it was Earth as a background, then it had four red letters written over it, ATRF. It must have been new because neither of us had heard of any ATRF before.

The base was surprisingly empty, there wasn't even anyone in the control room when we entered. There's a storage room right next to the gate room which we raided for supplies and a couple of bags before we dialled the gate and hurried through. I'd planted some explosives to go of thirty seconds after we dialled so we hurried. I stepped through first and Daniel was right behind me.

I was the only one who came out on the other side and I've been on the run ever since. It did take me a few days to figure out that they used the subspace beacon in my arm to track me, so I dug it out and crushed it. That was three days ago, since then I've been holding up on the planet where you found me. I didn't think they'd find me again so I set up a more permanent camp."

"Yes, I saw at least two men falling victim to the traps you've placed and many more had been injured or killed when they returned through the gate."

"It's sad when you have to kill the men who serves the same country as your own."

"You need to let go of those thoughts O'Neill, you do not serve your country any more, you will be one of the cornerstones of the new Alterran empire, that is where your allegiance needs to lie."

"Only after we clean out Kinsey from the White House."

"Then we'll need a ship. But first I believe I promised to show you something." He said as he stood up and walked inside the rings. "It's not much, but it is what I and now we, have to work with."

"I always like sightseeing." O'Neill said as he joined him at the rings which activated.


	9. Chapter 9

"The view isn't that great" Mokar said as he walked up to the DHD and dialled the processing facility. "Like this world the facility on the other side of the gate is only accessible through the gate if an Alterran is using the DHD, it's sort of like a biometric lock."

"Lets see what we have to work with then" O'Neill replied as they stepped through the gate.

"Come here O'Neill" Mokar urged.

"This place looks like it could be inside Atlantis" O'Neill said as looked around while walked to joined him at the window looking out over the machinery of the facility. "Let me rephrase that, it looks like you could lose Atlantis inside this place."

"It is a processing facility, one of our largest. We created it to erect our greatest city, Vis Uban. Luckily for us the facility can create things which are more advanced than building materials. For example create a modified version of the Naquadah generators I received from you now that the facility once again has power."

"So you only needed them to power this facility?"

"Yes, plus the lab and another facility which hopefully will be operational by now."

"What else can it create?"

"Many things, I will show you what can be found in storage at the moment." He stepped over to the storage console and begun to sort through the list.

"That's chinese to me. I know that I'm suppose to be some kind descendant of the Ancients, but I've never bothered to learn their language" O'Neill said as he looked over his shoulder.

"It's actually Alterran, not chinese, but you're of little use to me if you do not understand" Mokar said and put a finger onto O'Neill's temple while he continued to scroll through the list of things.

"What's that good for?" Suddenly O'Neill had a headache.

"I have given you a basic knowledge of the language, the rest you'll have to learn or earn yourself."

"I hate it when people mess around in my head." O'Neill said as he steadied himself against the console.

"It can not be helped, I do not have the time or patience to teach you the language any other way." Mokar said as he moved over so O'Neill could look at the screen. Outside the window pointing to the gate a large door opened to the storage area for the hover sleighs and the one assigned to the potentia factory slid out. Then it headed down the tunnel to the storage vaults. "I know a place where we may obtain a ship. You will need some gear as it is in Goa'uld territory, I believe they are known as Tel'taks."

"Am I reading this right? Carter would be thrilled to study all these things."

"All in due time. It'll be a few minutes until it returns with your equipment and there is another facility we should visit." He said and motioned for the gate.

"What is it?" O'Neill asked before Mokar dialled the gate and they stepped through.

"It's a potentia factory, the only as of the moment." Mokar said as he walked up to the dormant building equipment and removed the vials, which were now half empty, from the rack before putting them back into the black box. Then he removed the two generators and put them in the bag along with the black box. "It was completed between the time you was shoot and the time we traveled to the processing facility."

"Brand new huh?"

"Work on the factory begun many millions of years ago, but sometime later the facility creating the building materials was destroyed and work stopped. Luckily for me it only lacked some core systems."

"So not brand new then. When will the first ZPM be ready then?"

"It depends really. I knew of the factory but since it was not done I do not know its specifications. It was suppose to create a potentia every sixth month, but the star we are using to gather the energy needed could have changed in many ways so I can not tell. The crystals used should be grown in a matter of days though."

"That's a long time to wait for a single unit."

"It's a high yield facility which collects all the energy given off by the star. A geothermal factory could take many years to produce one. Most factories we used where located in deep space with one small solar satellite around hundreds of stars to power it, those would take at least a year to create one. You must remember that a potentia is extremely powerful, to my knowledge there is nothing which can be compared to it. But we did use hundreds of factories at the height of our power to keep up with demand."

"I guess we'll just have wait then, or we could raid the Odyssey for the one they have before they turn it against us."

"These generators will give us enough power for now." Mokar said and held up one of the generators. "They will fit into a potentia socket and in truth few of our creations require the power given off by a potentia. Three of these generators could power the shield of Atlantis for a while."

"So two can dial the gate to another galaxy then?"

"In theory yes, but I can only connect one potentia to each DHD. Though it's possible we could either use the processing facility's gate, it's connected to the power grid of the whole facility, which is hooked up to four generators, or we might be able to plug the DHD of this gate into the internal capacitors of the factory." Mokar said as he hurried over to the control room situated in the far end of the room with O'Neill close behind.

"So we could dial Atlantis and report what's happened on Earth?"

"Yes, we should be able to do so." He begun to power up every console to check the status of the factory and the sun. "It seems the capacitors were installed before construction was finished, they've been filled up for many years now."

"Which means what?"

"It means once the potentias have been grown, we'll have fifty six potentias charged and ready to go." Mokar said.

"That's a lot of ZPMs, we can dial the gate to Atlantis many times with those." O'Neill said slightly shocked.

"We can do much more than to just dial the gate, we can restore Atlantis to full working order with those and plenty of time." Mokar ran between consoles and rerouted power into the DHD. "You should however know that the galaxy Atlantis is in and any changes made to Atlantis since she left Avalon is not included in my knowledge. The only knowledge I have of that galaxy comes from the time my creator spent in the city before ascending."

"There's an enemy in that galaxy, the Wraith, they drove the Ancients from the galaxy and they've been harvesting humans for food ever since."

"Of that I am aware, but things such as planets, gates and other things are not known to me." He strode out of the control room and up to the gate. "But it is a small galaxy and we should be able to scout it in a few hundred years. A good a place as any to start rebuilding."

"We humans don't have a few hundred years. I might live for another thirty years, if I'm lucky." He said as Mokar handed him the earpiece.

"We'll make an attempt at reaching Atlantis." Mokar said as he begun to dial. "This hasn't been done before like this, so it might be slightly unstable. Make it fast."

"Will do." O'Neill said as he tapped the earpiece a few times and begun to talk into it.

As O'Neill was trying to make contact Mokar looked through the DHD. In Atlantis thirty nine armed men were standing in front of the gate with their weapons aimed it it. But the control room was deserted and he did not detect a single life sign except from the soldiers within the range of the sensor pack. Still large areas were being jammed, so it was possible that there were more people there.

"No one's responding." O'Neill said after a minute.

"I think I know why. The men who chased you are guarding the gate, thirty nine of them. I can't detect anyone else through the DHD. But it seems something's jamming the sensors a few floors below the gate." Mokar said as he closed down the gate.

"There's no way for them to have taken the city that quickly, our ships are fast but it still takes a couple of weeks to travel between Pegasus and the Milky Way" he replied as Mokar dialled the gate again. "Unless they've captured the Odyssey and are using it's ZPM. Then they could make the trip in four days."

"We will retake the city soon O'Neill. That I promise you. But first we'll deal with Terra and the small problem you seem to have with your leader." Mokar said as he dragged O'Neill with him through the gate. Leaning towards the wall to the control room was a bag identical to Mokar's. "There's your equipment, I suggest you suit up."

"What is this stuff?" O'Neill said as he held up the shield and the stunner which was in the bag. "I understand this is some kind of weapon, but what's this green thing?"

"It's a stunner, anyone you hit will be knocked out for a few hours, the more shoots the longer they'll stay down, and the other is a shield, put it beneath the shirt to hide it from sight, it will stop anything which may try to harm you. You can calibrate the shield by thinking about what properties you want it to have" he said as he placed his bag against the wall. "We won't need the bags for this."

"Just let me test this out" O'Neill said and fired a few shoots at the wall. "This really shoots where you aim it."

"Yes, we've used them as our sidearms since before our fall" he said while dialling the gate.

"I hope you have something with a little more kick, otherwise all you victims will be walking away after a while" O'Neill said as he headed for the gate only to be stopped by Mokar. "What now?"

"There's eight Jaffa on the other side of the gate with their staffs aimed at the gate" Mokar said as he begun to fire into the gate. "I will clear the way."

"We have shields, remember?" O'Neill said as he pressed himself by Mokar and headed through the gate followed by Mokar.

When they came through the gate the remaining three Jaffa fired into their shields before they knocked them out.

"The shields can only take so much before they fail, so we need to be careful" he said as he relieved the Jaffa of their arms.

"Something the Jaffa should think about maybe?" O'Neill said as he looked out over the village.

The village Mokar had left behind not long ago was not the same, the houses lied in ruins and not even the once holy temple had been left unharmed. Large chunks of the pyramid was missing and they could see inside it in several places.

"It looks like the Jaffa have risen up against the Goa'uld" O'Neill said as he begun to take shots at the Jaffa who charged out of the temple at them.

"I think it's rather because I shoot Arinna with a staff weapon when I fled the planet" Mokar said as they mowed down the charging Jaffa. "The ship we're after should be close to the pyramid or inside it."

"You killed a Goa'uld with a staff weapon?" O'Neill asked in disbelief as they rushed down to the temple without facing any more resistance.

"I was a Jaffa, not long ago, and I killed my goddess when she was yelling at me one morning" he said as they walked into the pyramid and booth shoot a lone Jaffa who tried to ambush them from behind a column.

"This seems to be a rather small temple, shouldn't be too hard to find the ship." O'Neill said as he walked away into a side passage.

"Already found it" Mokar shouted from behind the large golden throne. "Or at least I think so, there's a hidden door here. We just need to find the way through it."

"They always keep their buttons right here" O'Neill replied from the front of the throne just as the door swung open.

"We'll it's a ship. Not the one I was hoping for but it should do the trick." Mokar said as he stepped into the hidden room.

"That's better than an Tel'tak. It's an Ak'kesh, it's faster and more powerful" he said as they walked over to the ring platform sitting just outside the ship.

"I'm not familiar with this kind of ship" Mokar said as they transported inside.

"Lucky you, I've stolen a few of them over the years" he said as he left the cargo bay they'd been transported into. "I'll get her off the ground, you just need to give me a destination."

"We'll go back to Jobos, I want to bring some things with us"

"Where is Jobos?" O'Neill asked as he drove the ship through the roof. The look on Mokar's face was ice cold. "Sorry, couldn't find the door opener."

"It's the planet with the lab" he said as he walked up to the galaxy map and searched for the planet. "There it is."

"I'll set a course there as soon as we get out of the atmosphere."

"Good. I'll try to see what we're working with."

When they returned to normal space Mokar returned to the cockpit with a displeased expression. "We'll need to change a few things before I'm taking this anywhere near inhabited space."

"We're in no hurry, better do it well than to get blown out of the sky" O'Neill replied as they begun their descent through the atmosphere.

"I'll meet you on the surface, I'll get the things I need." Mokar said as he used the rings to get down to the surface. Sitting just outside the gate was a neat pile of equipment delivered from the processing facility. Who ever had planned on creating a small fleet had given him a blessing. The hover sleigh had brought a hyperdrive, a cloak, a couple of generators and some weapons, both for them and for the ship. Of course it had brought the tools which would be needed too.

Above him he could see the ship coming down. It was not something he would have prefer to ride in, but for now it would do. When the ship begun to come a few hundred meters from the ground he used the rings to get the first load onboard the ship. The ship would need to be on the ground in case he cut power to something important but he could still get everything onboard.

By the time the ship had landed everything was loaded onto the ship and Mokar had already begun to secure the new hyperdrive to the superstructure of the ship.

"You need a hand with anything?" O'Neill asked as he came out of the cockpit.

"Well, you can chose how you want to kill the man. I left a few weapons and a bomb on the ground, try them out and see what you like" Mokar said as he connected the hyperdrive to the console he had brought onboard to control the Alterran equipment. "Just don't test the bomb, it'll evaporate the ship and us."

"I heard you" O'Neill said as he used the rings to leave the ship.


	10. Chapter 10

"Nice of you to come out here when I have no way to come back inside." O'Neill said. He begun to move the weapons and the bomb inside the rings. It was clear that he was more than a little grumpy. "You should have warned me about the creatures which come out during the night to hunt." He was right up in Mokar's face and stabbed him in the chest with a finger to empathise every word.

"I am sorry O'Neill. I did not know there were any creatures on the planet. As far as I know nothing was alive when we surveyed the planet, though that was twenty million years ago, give or take ten million." He was as calm as always but he saw a creature coming out of the forest. It must have been as tall as him and the teeth in its strong jaws could probably pierce their chests all the way through. This monstrous beast was driven forward by six thick, strong legs, two pairs in the back and one pair at the front, and it seemed to be coming at them dangerously fast. As it ran the dark blue fur which covered it wavered in the wind. The closer it came the more it looked like a machine made to kill.

With everything was inside the rings O'Neill fired four bolts from one of his new toys at the beast but the fur absorbed them all. It showed no signs of slowing down so Mokar called up the rings.

"The good news is that I've gotten everything installed and we can go to Earth." They walked into the cockpit where the Alterran console had been installed.

"And the bad news?" Slowly O'Neill raised the ship into the air, his temperament was starting to settle down.

"Well apparently my backyard have visitors." Mokar said as he plotted a course to Earth. "Does Terra still have a satellite body?"

"A what?"

"A small celestial body which orbits Terra?"

"We call in a moon."

"Well we will use it to mask our arrival then. The sensors should pick it up on the first pass." He activated the hyperdrive just as they left the atmosphere.

"The first pass?"

"We'll swing around the solar system and approach Earth from the other direction, just in case."

"I don't think there's any risk of them finding out we arrived. The X-401 is of world securing the new Icarus base and all other ships are in Pegasus for repairs or to supply the city, I should know their orders came from me."

"We should be on the safe side." He would rather be on the safe side than ending up as the target for an attack vessel or any other ship really. "It will take a few hours to fly by Terra and then a few more to turn around and get back."

"I thought you Alterra were advanced? Our ships are faster than this." His slightly better temperament was turning sour again.

"Well the hyperdrive is not built for a ship this size, it was built for our fighters, the same goes for the generators I would have used the new generators but they are much too powerful for the hyperdrive."

Jack frowned. "I thought the ZPMs powered your ships?"

"Yes, most of our larger ships and some of the more advanced small ones, but it is easier to get the correct amount of power from a potentia than a generator made to put out as much power as possible. But a potentia takes a very long time to make."

"Then why aren't we using a larger hyperdrive then?" He was getting really agitated now but Mokar still kept his calm front.

"Because I thought we were going to get a smaller ship and ordered the parts before we left the processing facility. Still a larger drive would not have fit inside the rings and I knew of no other way to get onboard."

"I know there's another way inside the ship and Carter, Daniel or Teal'c should know how to open it."

"We will not have to worry about that for long O'Neill, there is a shipyard which should work in Darecian. I will check it out as soon as we are done here, I think it is time we start building ourselves a fleet."

"Let's not do anything too rash just yet." A fleet would require large crews and they both knew it, but that did not stop Jack's mind from wandering away, dreaming of large fleets of 304s and 302s which were constructed in a long forgotten shipyard. "We're is Darecia?"

"It is one of the galaxies we settled and one of the first we evacuated."

"You settled more than one galaxy? Dumb question, I know you settle at least two. How about a history lesson while we wait. Just don't tell anyone else that I asked for it, they'd never let me hear the end of it."

"Very well O'Neill, I will not tell anyone. Our history span millions of years, but I will try to make it shorter. We first developed in a galaxy far away long ago, we call it Freya. We had many struggles within our society but eventually we rose to the stars and developed faster and better ships. We begun to explore other galaxies too and had plans for settling there too, but we never had a chance to do so before our Ori brothers begun to ravage the galaxy with their believes and their fleet.

We fought a long war with them, each planet was fought for with everything we had. They on the other hand only cared to defend their most precious planets. Some planets they left without a defensive fleet while others were used by them as bait for our fleets while they sabotaged the systems star. It was only a few of their core worlds which they defended as fierce as we did ours.

I do not know how long the war lasted but it ended on the world we had evolved on. Both sides had lost all major production facilities and all shipyards. Yet the war was fought on the ground and in the air. The stalemate lasted for many generations until we managed to build another ship and flee the galaxy. When we came here we settled in Avalon.

Over time we settled many more galaxies and befriended the natives. Of course some conflicts bloomed up but we solved them in one way or another. Eventually we lost control over the situation in a galaxy and lost a fleet meant to protect an entire quadrant over a night. We stayed to our protocols and sent two larger fleets to investigate. Meanwhile another suppressed threat took the opportunity and ravaged an unknown number of lesser races. From there things spiraled out of control and ended with us returning to Avalon. In many ways it was very much like what happened millions of years before in Freya only this time we brought a plague with us when we returned to this galaxy, one that forced those of us that were not infected to abandon our brethren. What happened after that you know as well as I.

I have not had the chance to check every gate in all the galaxies, but it seems Avalon has remained mostly the same, unlike many other. Two of the galaxies in our domain have collided since we last walked the planes of those planets. At least four of our galaxies are as good as dead since every star in the galaxies seems to have burnt out and a fifth is halfway there. And I do mean half, not a star here and there, but like a line through the centre of the galaxy, one side black and one side just like Avalon."

"The Alterran domain spanned eight galaxies, nine counting Pegasus?" As Mokar had told the story O'Neill had been sitting there and thinking about what they thought they knew about the Alterra, how much of it was wrong and how much worse it seemed their struggle had been. A lonely tear escaped Mokar's eye but it was wiped away almost before O'Neill had seen it.

"No. It spanned thirty six, but at the moment it's thirty eight since Siyava and Sudab have been merged and we settled another three in an attempt to survive."

"Well you might want to start a bit smaller than that."

"For now my only interest is Avalon, the super galaxy which came from the merging of Siyava and Sudab, Darecian and the galaxy you call Pegasus."

"That's still five galaxies. Maybe you should start with the Milky Way and Pegasus and work your way from there?"

"No, the only shipyard which seems to remain is the one in Darecian. Since Atlantis is still in Pegasus and I do think we will keep the name, I will need to deal with the Wraith. Avalon was our core galaxy and Terra our capital so I can not let it go. Despite, Terra houses a population capable of bolstering our ranks and Avalon has got the processing facility too. Lastly the super galaxy houses three of our remaining mining operations, those three alone could provide the materials needed for many years into the future. They are the five I need to start with."

O'Neill sighed. "You're the one who decides when this is all over, but my suggestion would be to fortify the facilities you need in each galaxy and clean up one at a time."

"Your idea is sound and we will we proceed."

"Why do you keep saying we? I'll live another thirty years, at most. Then you're on your own again, or are there more of you out there in the universe?"

"I am alone O'Neill, but your age is only a number and your body can be repaired, I will see to it that you live for many years to come. Perhaps one day you will be on the council."

At the same time scepticism and hope rushed through him. "How?"

"You will see when we are done here." He checked a few things on the Alterran console. "It will be a few hours until we arrive, I suggest you get some sleep."

"Now that does sound like a good idea, it's always good to be rested before you try to assassinate a president." O'Neill joked and stepped away from the controls. He walked off into the ship while Mokar slumped down onto the floor right in front of the console. Healing O'Neill had taken much of his energy and it had taken him all of his will to function properly.

Many many hours later the console woke him up with a beep and he opened his eyes he to see O'Neill standing at the controls.

"We'll arrive in the solar system in a minute or two" O'Neill said without looking up.

"I will have the cloak activate as soon as we leave hyperspace." He begun to prepare the ship for reentry. Three seconds before they left hyperspace he opened the ships log to see how the equipment had worked and panic struck. "O'Neill, prepare for evasive maneuvers as soon as we leave hyperspace" he shouted.

"I thought you said we'd cloa….." was all O'Neill had time to say before they dropped out of hyperspace straight into a fleet of Ha'taks, twenty two of them. "We're aborting this right now. Get us back into hyperspace."

All around them the Ha'taks came to life and begun to spit out orange plasma bolts. "I agree with you General. I need a second or two to plot a new course."

"I can handle them as long as we're cloaked. I just don't feel like killing the president with twenty Ha'taks ready to lay waste to the planet to punish us for doing so."

"I just thought it was a bad idea to try to destroy all the ships with this ship" Mokar replied as the hyperdrive activated and they escaped the onslaught. "We will need a fleet."

"A single 304 and a ZPM could take them on, we just need the right ship for the job."

"Perhaps the Asgard could lend us a ship, do they still reside in the Thuvalan galaxy?"

"The Asgard blew up their planet, their last colony. It was in a galaxy called Othala if memory serves. They gave all their technology to us before they killed themselves."

"I see." Another tear trailed down Mokar's face, but this time he let it fall to the floor. "Do you know the reason why they did so?" Inside he could feel sorrow trying to surface when he thought of all the Asgard there had been when the Alterra had informed them that they were leaving for another galaxy to flee the plague. The Asgard had been a surprise, when the Alterra first chose their galaxies there had been no sentient life in most galaxies and it was thought that no life would evolve without help, but a couple of million years later the Asgard came along and begun to explore Thuvalan. Their technology evolved surprisingly fast for such a young race and the Alterra could see the potential in them.

They did not come from outside their domain but rather the Asgard evolved on one of the planets there without the Alterra's notice or help. The Alterra had been quick to support the Asgard in their endeavors and when a war broke out between the Asgard and another race in the Thuvalan galaxy the Alterra had been there only days later to assist the Asgard with their own fleet. When war begun in the other galaxies the Alterra had to withdraw their ships yet only a few years later the Asgard were victorious themselves and begun to assist the Alterra where they needed.

"They did some changes to their bodies they regretted but couldn't fix, so they chose to die instead of slowly fading away."

"That is regrettable, they are… Were powerful allies. We will have to build a fleet ourselves it seems."

"We will need more than a fleet, we'll need an army. If those Ha'taks are here the Goa'uld are sure to have brought Jaffa along, we will have to deal with them at the same time. And if it's the Lucian Alliance things aren't much better."

"I can build a fleet, but I can not build an army. An army needs to be trained."

"We won't need to train an army, we just need to recruit one. There's millions of soldiers on Earth, most countries should be able to liberate themselves as long as we get those ships out of the sky. The hard part will be to organize them." A thought struck him as his face lit up. "How good are you at raising the dead?"

"The dead are dead O'Neill, could I bring the dead back I would have brought back the entire Alterran population."

"We still have her consciousness, she just lacks a human body. If you could get her back into her own body I'm sure she can organise the armies of Earth."

"In what state have you preserved her mind?" Mokar looked puzzled, had the Terran's managed to preserve a mind before they could create new bodies?

"She's residing in a replicator body floating in space, she sacrificed herself by walking through a space gate to protect Atlantis."

"You are referring to the Asurans? My knowledge of things developed in the Pegasus galaxy is limited at best. But from what little I have I do believe I can do it. I would need her body to be sure and samples of her DNA to grow a new body. But I do believe there's a lab in the Shaban galaxy which contains the necessary equipment. Do you have the address to the gate?"

O'Neill looked at him as if he was the moron. "You think I memories every important gate address we've ever visited?"

Mokar's face stayed in the same stone hard look of indifference. "I would think so."

"Well I don't."

"Very well. I should be able to find the gate, it might take me a few days to look through all the space gates in Pegasus. You would need to take the ship there and retrieve her."

"Or we retake Atlantis and use the jumpers to retrieve her."

"We do not have the manpower to hold Atlantis if we can take it. Just because I only detected around forty guards many more could hide in the city."

"Let me worry about the guards Mokar. Give me this ship, two days and I'll have a plan ready to go. Just make sure we can get through the shield around the gate and that we can dial out of there when we're done."

"That will not be a problem but first there is something we need to do" Mokar said while they dropped out of hyperspace. "There is a gate on the planet below, set the ship down a few hundred meters in front of the gate."

"There's no rings on the planet, we'll have to find some other way of the ship."

"I will make a hole if I have to, just set us down" he said while he left the bridge.

When the ship touched down on the planet Mokar was waiting for O'Neill in the cargo hold in front of a large door which was opening to reveal a large desert outside. "Looks like you found it."

"I've rigged the door to open when we send a subspace signal. Lucky for us there is plenty of transmitters in the vaults" Mokar said while they left the ship and the door begun to close behind them. They walked away from the ship and as they looked back it cloaked.

"I hope I remember where I parked it" O'Neill joked as they approached the gate.

"The same signal which opens the door will decloak it too" he said as they stepped through the gate to the processing facility. "Wait right here for a minute."

"I thought you were in a hurry" O'Neill replied when one of the hover sleighs came into the room and drifted away towards the vaults.

"I have no reason to be in a hurry. The longer we wait the higher the chance that we will have six potentias by the time we invade Atlantis. If that happens we could move the city to another planet to protect it. We could also wait for that to happen just to save the city." Mokar had disappeared into the control room but now he came back and dialled the gate again. "Come, there is something we need to do."

"Where are we going?" O'Neill asked as they stepped up to the gate.

"Gamia."


	11. Chapter 11

"You could have chosen a world with better smell" O'Neill said and wrinkled his nose.

"I did not chose it. There is a piece of technology here which we need to use right now" Mokar said as he begun to search for the way back inside. "Over here."

"What are we looking for in this dump?" He was sinking down to his knees while wading through the swamp.

"The machine which turned me into an Alterran." Mokar activated the hidden switch which beamed them into the facility. "Feel free to look around, it'll take me a few minutes to calibrate the machine to the right settings."

"Where are we?" When he turned around there was no sign of Mokar and the question went unanswered.

The Alterran knowledge had allowed Mokar to access the hidden control room which controlled and overlooked the whole trial. On one of the walls hung two counters reading one and nine hundred twelve thousand five hundred sixty one, the number of successes and the number of attempts since the construction of the facility. It was the lone console that he stepped up to. On it he could see the entire process and all the variations to the trials he could make, yet it was only one part of the process he was interested in changing and using.

When he returned to the corridor where he had left O'Neill the man was standing halfway down it and looked into one of the rooms. "I was beginning to wonder where you'd gone."

"I needed to change some parameters of the process used by the facility" Mokar explained and waved for him to approach.

"And this facility was what created you?"

"This facility was what changed me from Jaffa to Alterran" Mokar corrected. He stepped away from the crystal in the wall and motioned towards it. "When you are ready just wave your hand over the crystal. I will wait for you by the gate."

"What is this going to do?"

"It will make your quest easier."

With a wave of his hand O'Neill was gone and Mokar hurried up to the crystal to change everything back in the control room before heading back to the gate to take care of a few things. When O'Neill was beamed out into the swamp he was sitting on the platform of the gate and waited.

"I hope you know what you were doing with those two things. I've almost been killed indirectly by both of them."

"It is perfectly safe O'Neill. I hope you like my gift."

"What gift?" Crawl towards the gate through the mud and water. His legs were too unstable to support his weight.

"In the days to come you will see all those years washed of your body, they will not return for many hundreds of years. Since you will also be serving me all these years I have added something to allow you to use the DHDs like I do, but that will take a long time. Come you will need some better clothes."

"Probably, these are ruined!" O'Neill said as he crawled onto the platform.

"Here." Mokar pulled a jacket as white as snow and a pair of equally white pants from the bag he carried. "O'Neill, you are now the first of the next generation of the service race, the ones you call Lanteans."

"I'm proud" O'Neill scoffed. But he still took the clothes and walked behind the gate to change.

"There are more things you will need" Mokar said and followed O'Neill.

"Do you mind? I'm trying to change."

"I know that you are" he said without any intention of moving and removed two small black orbs from the bag. "You will need these two."

"And what are they?"

"One is your identificator, it will identify you to most Alterran equipment, for example it will allow you to reach the hidden part of the gate network, like the lab, potentia factory or processing facility. The other is an emergency transmitter, you can guess what it does can't you?"

"I can. So which is which?"

"You can chose, but once you have used it as one it can not be changed."

"And how do they work?"

"Like this." Mokar pressed the two orbs into O'Neill's hands, one in each. On the backside of the hands a bump formed and when he removed his hands there were no sign of the two orbs ever being there. "Just press the bump and think of the function you want to use the first time, after that you should only need to think about it."

"This feels kind of creepy."

"You will get used to it. Further down the road the identifier will not be needed." He returned to the DHD. "I have stocked the ship with enough supplies for two weeks, I suggest you return before that."

"I'll be back long before that, I only need to find a Jaffa and get a bomb" O'Neill said as he came over and begun to dial the gate.

"A possible recruit?"

"If we're going up against the Goa'uld he might be, but sadly for you he's already part of my team" O'Neill said as he walked through the gate.

"And you're already in my team" Mokar said while he redialled the gate and stepped through to the potentia factory.

A few days later, after he had prepared their equipment and everything else he thought they would need to take the city he placed a hand on the DHD he begun to search for the gate to the lab they would need to grow a new body and transfer a consciousness into it. He knew that it was suppose to be in the Shaban galaxy but the Alterra there had been reserved with the information they gave to the creation of the repositories.

It took him a long time to find the right gate but when he did it was not what he had expected. Standing by the DHD was an Abasy, best described as a modern demon, complete with horns and wings. The one standing by the DHD seemed to be one of the higher ranks within what could have been described as the fire cast of the race and around him were most other types and ranks of Abasy. The Abasy used suits to interact with the world, in their true form they were a cloud of gas incapable of interacting with normal matter, their size and colour could differ depending on their heritage, but when they possessed a suit they became physically able to interact with normal matter and the moment the suit was destroyed the cloud faded back out of phase, meaning they could not be touched. As far as the Alterra knew they had not managed to kill a single one despite slaughtering millions of suits.

The suits they possessed had been built to be fearsome and to scare the more primitive races, borrowing from many primitive thoughts of primal elements in the younger races they had made suits inspired by fire, ice, earth and wind. Sadly it had worked well and the population had fled in panic when they came instead of putting up some resistance until the Alterra had arrived.

They had been the reason the Alterra had been forced out of three galaxies, Mubt, Annwn and Thulenaor. For him this changed everything, of course he could not assault the lab or even hope of using it again so he used the few connections the DHD had to activate the self destruct in the lab.

When the countdown begun to sound through the lab all of the Abasy begun to hurry away from the gate. When he could not detect the Abasy any more he prepared to survey the other installations in that galaxy so he activated the life sign scanner and watched in disbelief as it showed twelve life signs clumped together in one of the labs, the Abasy could not be detected due to their nature but they could be detected by the EM fields they emitted and there were no deviating EM fields left.

After reassuring himself that the Abasy were gone he dialled the gate and stepped through. The lab looked almost identical to the one he had under his control, with the addition of a door which opened to the planet beyond and a few more actual labs. The lab he was interested in was much deeper into the facility so he hurried up to one of the consoles and shut of the self destruct while also activating the lab's shield to keep the Abasy outside if they begun to wonder why the lab had yet to explode.

It took him a minute to reach the door. When he opened it he regretted it, his stomach turned around and tried to force the latest ration pack up again. The lab, which must have been one of the growing rooms, had been transformed by the Abasy into a torture chamber with body parts and organs strewn around the room.

From every wall red and grey spikes the size his arm pointed, each and everyone of them covered in a white and blue goo. Impaled onto these spikes were countless humanoid bodies in every possible position, all with body parts missing or hanging in thin pieces of flesh. The twelve life signs were easy to find as the ones which were alive radiated a sort of blue aura.

This was not a known species, at least not to the Alterra. Still they did seem to be on the same side as the Alterra against the Abasy. As he begun to remove the closest one from the spiked wall he saw the blue and white goo streaming out of the holes, but to his surprise the wounds closed only a few seconds after it was down on the floor and its breathing steadied.

As it lay there on the floor he could see two white stumps sticking out of its back and before his eyes they begun to grow while feathers grew out of them. In less than a minute they had grown into a pair of proper wings which covered its entire frame. Letting it have some rest he begun to help the other eleven down from the spikes and watched their wounds heal fast, even faster than his own wounds would. Here and there a missing arm or leg slowly grew out again when they touched the floor.

Behind him the first had recovered enough to stand up. " _We thank you stranger. We thought ourselves to be lost."_

" _I am happy that I might have found allies against the Abasy."_ He saw one of the others forcing itself up and moving up to him.

" _It is as Camiel claims, we thought we would die here."_ Its body was covered by the mighty wings which seemed to be even larger than the others but its voice did sound more feminine. " _If it is allies you are looking for you have found them."_

" _Can you move? We need to evacuate the facility before they return."_

" _I can and the others will too."_ The facility was rocketed by an explosion and Mokar was thrown towards one of the spiked walls. One of the tips touched his flesh and jolts of pain ran through his body.

With some effort him pulled himself of the floor, still shaking in pain. " _Let us hurry."_ He lifted up one whose legs were slowly growing back.

" _I hope you have a ship capable of outrunning their ships."_ Everyone followed him out of the room, some by their own accord and some carried.

" _My only ship is busy at the moment."_

" _Then what hope do we have of making it of this planet?"_

" _Through the gate."_ He freed himself from those he was supporting to dial the gate.

When the gate dialed he turned around to lift up the cripple but he found all of them kneeling in a semi circle.

" _Don't just stand around there, move it"_ he shouted but they stayed where they were.

" _You are of the divine?"_ one of them asked. This one too seemed to have a feminine voice.

" _Silence Azriel"_ the first woman hissed.

" _I am of the Alterran."_ Another explosion threw them all to the ground. " _Please come with me, we must hurry."_

" _It will be as you command"_ she said after they had gotten off the floor and walked up to the gate.

When all of the creatures had stepped through the gate he waved his hand in front of the potentia socket and watched three panels in the wall open to reveal one drained, one half full and one full potentia. It did seem a bit too much for a simple lab, but he did not complain as he place the full potentia in his bag and resumed the self destruct. Then he hurried out of there.

On the other side of the gate the twelve humanoids were looking out through the panoramic window on the star which powered the potentia factory. " _Are you of the Divine?"_

" _As I have already said I am of the Alterran race. The builders of the gates"_ he replied as he pushed by them to the control room.

" _Then you are of the Divine, builders of the heavenly gates"_ the lady said as she alone followed him into the room.

" _We prefer to be called Alterra."_ He tapped at the console.

" _Still you are of the Divine. It is our greatest honour to meet you. We have awaited the return of your kin for many eons."_

" _I am sorry to disappoint you, but there is only me."_

" _Then you are The Divine. When the Divine left us long ago they foretold their return. A new generation of Divine who was to be lead by The Divine itself."_

" _And what is The Divine to you?"_

" _You are the one to lead us against the Abasy. You will lead us to victory."_

" _I am sorry to say this, but I am in no position to defeat the Abasy. My kind fought them before and lost. What they posses may be destroyed, but their true form can not be damaged."_

" _That is why those coming before you created us, we can reach them when they fade from this world and we can kill them as they try to flee back to the fiery pits that spawned them. Lead us and we will bring you victory."_

" _There are many things I know, but I have no knowledge of your creation."_ The gate activated and the hover sleigh he had called for came through, one of its sides opened up and piles of clothes drifted out and onto the floor. " _I will need to see your leaders."_

" _The Arches are all gone Divine, I am a Watcher of the Choirs, captured as we tried to defend the Arches by the side of the Guards of Iya. We twelve, a fraction of the defenders of Iya are all that remains of the Angelo."_

" _Then you will have to grow in numbers to be of any use to me."_ He walked outside with her close behind and picked up the clothes. " _But we will start small, get dressed."_


	12. Chapter 12

**A/N:** Beta readers needed. Send me a PM if you are interested.

He was doing push ups when he heard the discharge of staff weapons mixed with other sharp sounds and it was coming closer. A few seconds later he saw one of the guards outside his cell step out into the corridor and receive a compact blue blast in the chest.

"O'Neill" he cried out to warn his friend who had just stepped into the corridor. The second guard point his staff at his friend just as the later rounded the corner. Then the guard fired and an orange bolt hit the man straight in the chest. Everyone but O'Neill was surprised when the orange bolt impacted a green barrier just as O'Neill raised his weapon and fired.

"You don't look too happy to see me" O'Neill said. He aimed his weapon at the cell bars, two weak, sharp, blue blasts melted the lock.

"I did not think anyone would come for me so soon." Teal'c's face was a large smile. He saw his friend step out into the corridor only to take multiple staff blasts to the body while returning fire.

"Well I did didn't I?" O'Neill said while Teal'c picked up a staff and helped out. "We need to get moving, I'm not sure how much more this thing can take."

"The rings are this way" Teal'c said and pointed down one corridor.

"I came to find something else too, I hoped the Goa'uld would have some sort of Tok'Kal which can knock out everyone in an entire city."

"The device you seek is called a Tak'Kol. They are not considered to be honourable by the Jaffa, still there should be some on the ship" Teal'c said and changed direction.

"Care to tell me how you ended up in that cell?"

"I was ambushed when I entered the council chambers some days ago. Their intention is to attack Earth, they say many Jaffa worlds have been made devoid of life and they blame you."

"I'm sad to say it, but they may be right. The day after you left for Dakara we had a change in leadership, and not for the better, but we're planning to correct that soon."

"Then they must be put on trial before the council."

"No, they will not be allowed to get of the planet" O'Neill whispered seconds before they ambushed a patrol and a pair of guards.

"We may not have time. Most of our ships are engaged in a campaign against a Goa'uld who has grown too strong, they have been for many months but I do not think it will be long until they are victorious and then they will bring the full force of our fleet down upon Earth." They stepped into a storage room and walked up to a Tok'Kal which was many times larger than the normal kind. When Teal'c pressed a button on a control panel it rose up from the ground. "This is the Tak'Kol."

"Well then, let's get going."

"There is a set of rings just down the corridor" he said as they walked out with the Tok'Kal following right behind him.

"Well come on then." O'Neill said and rushed down the hall.

At the rings Teal'c stepped inside with the Tok'Kal, which took up all the remaining space inside, while O'Neill had to stay outside while Teal'c and the bomb ringed over.

"Lay down your weapons" a Jaffa shouted. Behind him several more came into the hall.

"How about you put them down instead" O'Neill said. His weapon was pointed at the group. Then he pressed the button and jumped into the rings as staff blasts slammed into his shield.

"O'Neill are you alright?" Teal'c asked as he saw the rings retracting around his friend.

"Just give me a minute" O'Neill said. He felt the shield tumbling inside his clothes. "Get us out of here for now." On his leg he could see the damage of a grazing blast but he could see the muscle fibers ever so slowly growing back in place.

When Teal'c reached the controls of the ship it rose from the hull of the Ha'tak where O'Neill had landed the ship. "O'Neill. Their shields are active but our hyperdrive is damaged."

"We're cloaked so we're safe and we're using an aftermarket hyperdrive so use the Ancient console to set a destination." O'Neill said as he tried to put weight onto his leg, which gave away under him.

"It is not responding to my commands O'Neill. It is as you claim, aftermarket equipment is not good." Teal'c came running from the cockpit and lifted up O'Neill. "They will begin to shoot at random to find us in moments."

"This is Ancient equipment Teal'c, it's better than what was here to begin with" O'Neill said while he shifted his weight onto the console and begun to tap at the display. Outside they could see that the Ha'tak begun to fire at random."I'll need a moment to activate it, unless you want to vaporise the Ha'tak."

"It matters not to me O'Neill, they do not want me alive and so I could not care less for their fate" Teal'c said, much to O'Neill's surprise. "If we vaporise this ship it will be one less we must face in battle over Earth. The fleet already gathered here is large enough that it will prove hard to stop."

"If you say so" O'Neill said and pushed a button. In front of the ship the hyperspace window opened and the ship slipped through while the Ha'tak was ripped into pieces. "Still that wasn't the decision of the honorable warrior I used to know."

"There is nothing left of the honour the Jaffa had when they fought under the Goa'uld, they do not deserve respect or honour anymore" Teal'c said in disgust. He slumped down against one of the consoles. "I believed the Jaffa could unite, but these days I have been proven wrong. The oppression of the Jaffa and humans of the galaxy is again as strong as when the Goa'uld ruled, only now the Jaffa are the ones oppressing. The nation I have fought to create have become the thing I fought, the high council is no better than the Goa'uld, they are just as greedy and power hungry."

"Sounds like regular politicians to me." A small pool of blood begun to form around Teal'c. "Isn't the Tretonin suppose to heal you right up."

"It has done before, but the effect has decreased lately." Teal'c said while the pool grew.

"Just hang in there, you're lucky we're not to far away from home." As he said the words O'Neill saw his friends head fall over to the side.

On Jobos Mokar was showing the Angelos around the lab when one of the consoles begun to beep. In confusion the Angelos begun to look for enemies while he himself walked up to the console to see why it was sounding the alarm. On the screen the sensors showed an object, possibly a ship, which was going to crash close to the gate. He did not need the sensors to identify the image shown as the ship he had allowed O'Neill to take. With a few presses he activated the transmitter and tried to reach the ship, but no one seemed to respond.

In horror they watched the ship plummet from the sky at breakneck speed. Far too late it begun to level out. With the grace expected of a large blue whale the ship impacted the ground and skipped over the surface.

It took some time before the ship lost momentum and begun to carve a long ditch into the forest. By the time it stopped it had carved a path far into the forest which had been set on fire by the ship. Powerless to stop the raging fire they saw the ship disappear for a few seconds before a shield formed around the ship.

His mind was in chaos when he looked around the lab for anything to save them with. After failing to find anything useful in the lab he ringed down to the gate.

Inside the ship O'Neill felt his heart sink as he looked out of the ship, he had managed to activate the shield but now the forest around them was burning and without help he knew Teal'c would be dead soon. During the trip the blood pool had grown much larger and the sticky liquid now covered large parts of the floor.

After what felt like hours one of the consoles beeped and when he looked at the screen it showed a long and thin object closing on their position quickly from behind the ship. Hoping for aid he hurried to the back of the ship, as fast as he could with an injured ankle, surprisingly enough one of only two injuries he'd gained from the brutal landing, the other being a broken arm.

When he opened the cargo doors some ash fell down onto the floor while they slid open, slowly at first then faster. Halfway open they grinded to a halt with a loud rumble. Far away on the horizon he saw a dot appearing and quickly forming into the hover sleigh used in the processing facility.

When it reached the shield the sleigh passed right through it and forced its way into the cargo hold through the half open doors.

When the sleigh had stopped halfway into the ship one of the side panels opened and Mokar jumped out.

"Classy" O'Neill said as he limped up to the man.

"I do try my best O'Neill" Mokar said as he tried to help him into the sleigh.

"There's a Jaffa in the cockpit who's injured" O'Neill said. He broke out of the Alterran's grip and tried to move towards the Jaffa."I think he could be ready to join you."

"I will see to him O'Neill. But I do hope your plan does not rely on recruiting a single Jaffa." Mokar hurried off into the cockpit to tend to the Jaffa.

"Of course I do" O'Neill shouted while he begun to push the Tok'Kal from the corner it had ended up in during the crash. Luckily for him it still floated lazily just over the floor, a large dent had however been created in the wall next to it.

When the Tok'Kal came within a short distance of the hover sleigh it was surrounded by a force field which guided it inside the sleigh.

"O'Neill, I will need your help to move the Jaffa."

"I'm coming." He limped towards the cockpit, halfway there he heard a crack from his broken wrist and as he prepared to fall face first into the floor the pain in the ankle disappeared and he could stand straight again. This Lantean change felt good, he felt young again and that was a feeling he had not felt in many years, probably several decades. Hehad begun to respect the Ancient, or Alterran which he seemed to prefer, during their short time together. They had not done much together but he liked what he had seen so far.

"I've done what I can for him, but he has lost much blood and will need to recover" Mokar said as they lifted Teal'c inside the hover sleigh. "I hope you found what you needed for your plan."

"Of course." Together they climbed into the cargo hold where Mokar opened a panel which protected the manual controls.

"I hope your plan does not rely on him though." Mokar said. The metal of the sleigh and the ship groaned as they forced their way out of the ship. "Even with a symbiote it would take him a number of days to recover until he can fight."

"As a matter of fact it doesn't, but I'd consider him an asset." O'Neill said as the sleigh raced through the blazing fire. "I stole a bomb which will stun everyone in the city, if it works as planned. Still it wouldn't have hurt to have a third person for the assault, just to secure the city."

"You do not need to worry about that. The good news is that I have managed to find ourselves a group of warriors, the bad news is that the lab I hoped to use in growing the body was destroyed in the process."

"Well you can build another right?"

"Yes, with enough resources and manpower it can be done easily."

"That's just a temporary setback then. Teal'c told me the Jaffa fleet will be going to attack Earth soon, most likely within the month."

"You know we are not ready to take on a fleet yet. I have not checked on the shipyard yet, but I do not think we are in any position to construct a fleet without much repair work done to the shipyard."

"I think we at least should check up on it."

"I do agree with you O'Neill." The sleigh stopped quickly and the hatch opened. They jumped out of the hover sleigh and were covered in ash raining down upon them. From the direction of the crashed ship they heard a loud bang, like distant thunder, while they hauled Teal'c out of the sleigh and into the rings.


	13. Chapter 13

He did not know why they had been put in there, just the two of them, but he sure as hell did not plan on sticking around. "Come on Rodney, the third patrol just walked by." He had learnt a thing or two from one of his friends about concealing blades when being captured. With two hidden blades the other man had forced the door control panel open and was now attempting to open the door.

"I'm working as fast as I can. They designed it to be tamper proof..." They heard a click and the door begun to slide open "but they didn't have me to help them."

"Good work Rodney, now shut it." Sheppard slid the blades back into their concealed sheaths. The corridor outside was as grey and boring as the tiny holding chamber they had just broken out of, like most thing on Tau'ri ships the walls and floors were designed without any sort of fancy design, instead they had been designed and built to be easy to replace, but above all else functional. "This way."

"But the rings are this way" McKay complained while pointing the other way.

"We're not taking the rings" Sheppard growled, dragging him down the hall. They had only taken a few steps down the hall when the alarm sounded and a symbiote voice shouted through the speakers mounted around the ship.

"This is bad, the internal sensors can track us everywhere we go."

"Then start running." Sheppard threw caution out the window and begun to sprint down the corridor. Further down the corridor two airmen came around the corner and looked up from their conversation just in time to see two men in black jackets and matching pants race towards them. The first of the airmen just had time to raise an arm to protect his face when Sheppard feinted a blow from the right before sending a kick into the man's jewels. The kick sent his enemy tumbling backwards onto the floor while holding his nuts in place.

For McKay things went very different. He had fallen several meters behind Sheppard, enough for the airman to have time to react and block the slow and crude left hook McKay tried to land on her. Then she countered him by driving a knee into his abdomen and following up by grabbing his head. Before she had the chance to drive his head into her rising knee Sheppard was back on his feet with a freshly looted Zat in his hand and shoot her in the back.

"Beaten by a girl, that must be a new low for you?" Sheppard asked as he threw the woman's Zat to McKay who fumbled to catch it.

"No, a girl in my class beat me up in fourth grade" McKay said while he gave the woman a kick for good measure.

"That's a low you'll never hear the end of" Sheppard promised as he continued down the hall.

"No no no, you can't tell anyone about that" McKay pleaded.

"Then shut up and don't get killed." Sheppard pressed himself against the wall right next to a door.

"This is the core room" McKay whispered in surprise. He pressed himself against the wall on the other side of the door.

"Good, you're catching up." He pulled the sprint from a grenade he had taken from the airmen. "Now open the door and close it when I throw this through."

A simple nod was all he got before the door opened and he rolled the grenade into the room. The door slammed shut. Moments later the grenade exploded. The door opened once again by technicians who came stumbling out of the room. With their Zat's they formed a nice pile of bodies before slipping into the room where the security systems had begun to drain the smoke. From the door on the other side of the room three airmen came into view as McKay pressed a big red panic button the Tau'ri had built into the Asgard consoles. In response the doors slammed shut with enough power to cleave a human in two while bulkheads dropped from the ceiling and others rose more slowly from the floor.

"That won't keep them occupied forever." He stepped up to the pinkish Asgard console.

"We won't need forever McKay, we just need to get of the ship and back to the city."

"And then what?" McKay turned around, anger boiling in his face. "They sent everyone home except for us."

"No, they must have taken all senior officers elsewhere, Lorne's out there too and he's sure as hell not going to give up just like that" Sheppard said calmly. "Now please Rodney, beam us out of here and make sure they can't follow us using this."

"Fine." A few seconds later a white cylinder was beamed into the room. The design did not show much of its function but the design was clearly Asgard and the two red streaks of running lights which circled the device did not need to be explained to Sheppard, it was a countdown. "It should knock out all Asgard systems on the ship, possibly all systems on the ship."

"That will do nicely Rodney. Now lets get off this rustbucket" he said and the white light enveloped them.

When the white light appeared again it was inside the city, three meters above the floor in one of the assembly halls. Without warning Sheppard fell hard onto the floor. "Rodney!" With a bleeding nose he pressed up from the floor and looked around for any sign of McKay, nothing, all he saw was the man's Zat and radio lying a short distance away, the later shattered into the hundreds of pieces from the fall.

Cursing in silence he pushed up from the floor and tried to get his bearings. This section of the city was not familiar to him though many of the sections seemed to look the same, still the thick layer of dust gathered on the floor told of many years of neglect. With one Zat in each hand he walked out of the hall and into the corridor. As he wandered down the halls he saw no signs of anything, except for many untouched years which had now been broken by his arrival. The whole section seemed to be unmoved by the events the rest of the city had been forced to endure, not even the storm which had damaged large parts of the city seemed to have been able to force its water inside.

After wandering through the corridors of the city for some time and still not finding anything but dust and doors which refused to open his radio begun to crackle. "Sheppard, can you hear me." The voice was Rodney's.

"I can hear you Rodney" Sheppard said as he ran into another closed door. "Where are you?"

"Thank god. I wasn't sure I had managed to fix it. I'm in the chair room. Where we should have ended up."

"Well whatever you plan was by beaming us there I suggest you do it, because I'm far from there. I think I'm in the lower sublevels of the city, there's no windows and the doors refuse to open." In front of him another of door denied him access.

"How the hell did you end up there?" Rodney asked. Over the radio he could hear the chair powering up in the background.

"I don't know Rodney, maybe someone messed up when they beamed us!" Sheppard snapped. He tried one of the stairs only to have his path blocked by a forcefield.

"I didn't do anything wrong, there has to be something wrong with the Asgard core. But I think I've managed to locate you."

"Well give me a way out of here then." The blue discharge from one of the Zats reflected of the forcefield into the wall behind him.

"We have guests too."

"We'll get me out of here and I'll deal with them. You're in the control chair, so just turn of the force field in front of the stairs" Sheppard snarled "I think I see a transporter just beyond the stairs on the floor above."

"Sheppard, listen to me. Zelenka might not be as smart as me but he's not a moron, he's tried to access that section for years and when he managed to get around one of the safeguards another locked in place long enough for the previous to reset." His voice seemed surprisingly calm considering their situation. "Still I'll see what I can do."

"Even Fort Nox can be broken by a large enough bomb."

"Yes of course it can! But the gold would be evaporated in the process!" McKay growled. A quick remark about military thinking ran over his lips.

"How hard could it be?" In front of him the forcefield rippled slightly and he could see its full extent. "See, that's a good start, now just shut it of."

"As much as I hate to admit it I'm having no clue about what you're talking about, whatever's happening it's not my doing. The chair lost power for a few seconds and I'm just getting back into the system."

"Well I just saw it shift and ripple, who's doing it if you're not?" He saw it ripple again.

"Not who but what. We have four guests down in the ZPM room. There's power spikes all over the city similar to when the replicators had taken…" McKay said as his voice trailed off. "They've must have brought at least two fully charged ZPMs."

"Make that three." The field rippled again and this time it stay visible, the light blue field waved lazy as his breath created small ripples which grew in size. "Whatever you're planning on doing I suggest you hurry."

"I'm working as fast as I can" McKay shouted

"Well work faster" Sheppard shouted back. He walked up to one of the ventilation shafts and kicked the cover inside. He had been in the same situation before where the only route through the city was through the ventilation but even after those times, because in truth there had been more than a few accidents were the city went into lockdown, he still did not favour the idea of climbing into the system.

"Great, so you're planning on jumping down onto the fan and get shredded" McKay's voice mocked him over the radio.

"We already know they stop if living tissue touches them so it's all good" Sheppard said while he climbed inside.

"That's only been tested once and I would not call Ronon throwing Dr. Porter's Corgi into the system a scientific experiment."

"More like doing a field goal with it" was the last thing Sheppard said before his radio was filled with static. Just like all the times they climbed inside the ventilation system their radios filled with too much interference for them to work.

The shaft itself was not that bad, it was just wide enough for a human to squeeze through when it was horizontal and when it reached the vertical main shaft it opened up to a platform where you could stand upright. From top to bottom in the main shaft a ladder ran.

Five floors above the hair on his head fizzled when it came into contact with another force field. Not feeling like getting electrified he climbed into one of the ducts and kicked out the lattice into the corridor outside. The corridor looked exactly the same as the one he had left below except for a window which sat in one of the walls. Through the window he could see the lower levels of the inner city. With one hand he opened the window and looked outside.

He was less than two stories above the ground floor, but above he saw a balcony. "Rodney, can you hear me?"

"I'd like you to hurry up and get up here, but the window's not a good idea."

"It's a good a plan as any." He climbed outside and the window closed automatically behind him.

"Nooo, that's a bad plan" Rodney said while Sheppard begun to look for slots where his hands could grip. "They're running power through damaged systems which shouldn't be activated. The whole city could explode at any moment."

"Unless you have a better way of getting up there you don't have a say in the matter." Slowly he began to climb upwards. "What systems are they powering? Any chance they'll blow me out of the sky with a couple of drones?"

"Unless they've brought more drones with them you're safe, we used them all protecting Atlantis against the Wraith." The whole tower shook slightly and Sheppard's left foot and right hand lost their grips.

"What's happening Rodney?" he asked after dragging himself onto a small ledge on the floor below the balcony.

"I don't know alright. They're powering up systems all over the city and the chair won't let me turn them of." Every word he uttered increased the panic growing in his voice. "The inertial dampeners were damaged, that's why the whole city trembled."

"Well do something" Sheppard said as he turned his attention back to the wall.

"I said I'm tr…." Before he could finish the sentence he was cut of by an electric hiss.

Before he got a chance to use his radio the city shook again and the shield rose up to envelope it. From below he could hear the roar of the stardrive and around the outside of the shield huge amounts of vapor rolled up towards the sky.

With a power he did not think he had he dragged himself along the wall up to the balcony. With a sweaty hand he grabbed the reeling and pulled himself up to it. Within the time of a heartbeat he heard the reeling buckle beneath his weight. Then it came clean of the balcony, still with him holding on to it for all he was worth.


	14. Chapter 14

O'Neill raised an eyebrow when he came into the chair room right behind the Angelos and they pulled a stunned scientist, Dr. Rodney McKay, from the chair. To say that the Tak'Kol had misfired was an understatement, it had managed to fry the nervous system of every living thing in the base they had encountered, human, cat, dog, spider, ant, everything had died. Still Dr. McKay had managed to survive long enough for the Angelo to come and stun him.

While it was a good sign that someone had survived the blast he had more pressing matters to take care of. From the control room in the central tower Mokar gave him control when he sat down in the chair. They had begun to prepare the city for take off as soon as they arrived, so it was only a matter of sending power to the engines for him now.

In the back of his mind a thought formed and the chair responded by showing a hologram of the city with clusters of white dots in the two ships parked on the piers and small groups in the control room, ZPM room and the chair room. Then there was a lone dot clinging to the outside of one of the towers in the inner city.

While the hologram had formed behind the chair his subconscious mind had received the information and processed it. Inside the upper part of the central tower one of the jumpers rose from its parking spot and shot out of the top, accelerating far beyond the capabilities of the inertial dampeners, as the sensors registered the integrity of the failing railing .

* * *

He fell and the adrenaline rushed through his body, time seemed to slow down while he used his arms and legs to turn around so he could see where he was going. A jumper shot past him and dove into his path. Without warning the jumper slammed on the brakes and he felt the open hatch catching part of the uniform as he tumbled past it while it closed. Once inside he heard the humming sound of the inertial dampeners working hard to compensate. The jumper hit the shield and sliced through it into the water, throwing him forward into the cockpit of the barrel shaped craft.

When he pulled himself of the console at the front he realised he could not see anything, then his hands found one of the controls the jumper's interior lit up again.

* * *

In the control room O'Neill could feel how Mokar blocked incoming messages from the two ships in orbit above the planet which moved in their direction. From the closest of the 304s, the Hammond he believed, a salvo from its railguns spat out and impacted the shield.

To O'Neill's surprise several more systems opened up to him on Mokar's command. When he sent power to them white energy bolts shoot out from multiple points in the city, where defensive turrets had risen from the towers, and into the aggressive ship. With a mental command he held the turrets back when the ship's shield failed. Another thought activated the hyperdrive.

* * *

With all the power found in the small vessel going to the engines and with smoke rolling out of the inertial dampeners he felt every G he pulled as he piloted the craft upwards, straight towards the glowing stardrive and the city which distanced itself from the planet. The closer to the stardrive he got the more the jumper moved side to side and he could see the jumper's shield rippel and deforming.

He closed in on the city and there a flash from one of the 304s above the planet, a split second later the right drive pod exploded. White streaks jumped from the city in retaliation and the 304's shield dropped, in response it turned around and moved away from the city. For a few seconds the city just hung there, then the city's stardrive tore a hole through the fabric of space into subspace.

It was with relief that Sheppard piloted the limping jumper up the side of the central tower and into the hangar above the gate. Moments before the city had been sucked into hyperspace the jumper's and the city's shields had merged and the later had extended to surround the jumper too.

As the smoking jumper landed in its spot a welcoming party formed around it. Inside Sheppard drew the Zat he had managed to hold on to and opened the rear hatch from behind cover of the wall which separated the front and rear compartments. Pressed against the wall he took a few shoots out of the opening hatch to deter anyone from rushing inside.

After a few minutes he saw no trace of the figures he had seen standing around his chosen spot and threw a glance over his shoulder. The man standing in front of the viewport seemed awfully familiar, like a classmate you had been in the same class with through your entire time in school but now after thirty years they had changed. As his mind tried to place the man the man walked around the ship and came into view again at the rear. "Hello."

"Stop right there."

"Stand down Colonel, you're among friends" the man said and held up two empty hands.

"I'll shoot you if you come any closer." He put a blast in the wall right next to the man.

"Stand down Colonel or I will have to make you stand down." Out of nowhere the man held a weapon in his hand.

Working on training Sheppard pressed the Zat and a blue discharge flew out towards the man. Instead of collapsing a green shield formed around the man and then a light blue bolt hit him square in the chest.

* * *

"About time you woke up." He opened his eyes and the bright light in the room burnt into them. "Looks like we're due to break out again."

"Rodney?" he asked as he recognised the voice. "What happened?"

"I was stunned. We're in one of the storage rooms in the control tower, I think." Rodney helped Sheppard of the hard floor. Just like Rodney said it seemed to be another of the nondescript rooms which seemed to fill no real function in the city and therefore the expedition had stoved their stuff inside them. Before they had the chance to say anything more the door opened and four of the most beautiful people either of them had seen stepped into the room dressed in pure white clothes.

" _Come with us, The Divine wishes to speak with you"_ one of them said and gestured for the door.

"You got any of that?" Sheppard asked.

"They're talking Ancient, they asked us to see their god" McKay said.

He headed for the door with McKay following right behind. "Great, the Ori's here" Only now when the four took up positions around them did they see the wings coming out of their backs.

"Do…" McKay begun before a sharp look from the man, if you would call him that with the wings, at the front cut him of.

Many minutes after being led up and down corridors, through rooms and up many stairs the man who had shoot Sheppard approached them. He waved his hand and their guards split up and disappeared into the city again.

"Guys. Come on. Hurry up." The man motioned for them to follow.

"So you're this God of theirs? I thought a god was more serious" Sheppard said. He did nothing to increase their tempo.

"Who me? No. He's off to Avalon. We dropped him of a while back." The man checked his wrist were a white band with a slightly wider circle on his skin told of a lost watch. "I'm not sure how long it's left, but would you mind hurrying up a bit?"

"Where is that?" Sheppard asked.

"It's the Ancient name for the Milky Way" McKay filled in. For whatever reason they both shifted to a light jogging to follow the man.

"He prefers Alterran, but we'll get to that later." They hurried up another set of stairs and took a right turn into a corridor.

"How long until what then?"

"Not what. Where. Aycleon, it's supposed to be a metal core planet with a global ocean, we hope it'll be the first cornerstone of the Pegasus infrastructure" he said as they turned into the chair room.

"Slow down just for a minute now." The man sat down in the chair and leaned back. "Who are you and why are you telling us this?"

"Come on, I gave you both the jobs you have right now, hell I'm the reason this city's even in this galaxy at the moment." A handful of holograms faded into view over the chair, they came and went as O'Neill needed them.

"General O'Neill?" Sheppard asked. His voice was filled with disbelief. "I'm sorry sir, I didn't know you've had a positive meeting with a Wraith."

"I didn't." A hologram floated over to the two. "That's my identification code, check it when you get the chance."

"Care to put us in the loop Sir?"

"Terra's been taken over by the Goa'uld, seems like they managed to take Atlantis too. But now we're here to take it all back." Above his head one of the holograms expanded. First it covered the roof with the blue-white-black striped view of hyperspace, then it spilled down the walls and poured onto the floor. From the base of the control chair a miniatyr of Atlantis was built up tower by tower and pier by pier. "That sounded better in my head."

"I'm sure it did Sir." The view of the room changed as the city left hyperspace. To one side a star was blown up to fill the wall and large parts of the floor and roof while a planet stretched out on the opposite side. Meanwhile the miniatyr city shrunk in size to be the right scale. "Still if you're really who you claim to be I'd like to have some more proof."

"I'll give you all the proof you want later Colonel" O'Neill said. The city begun to fall towards the planet. "But right now you have a mission Colonel, take a jumper through the gate and pick up something from the other side. That should give you some proof of our intentions."

"What are we looking for Sir?" Sheppard asked as he city begun to shake.

"I don't really have time to explain it all right now Colonel." The city begun it's descent through the atmosphere. "I kind of have my hands full setting this thing down smoothly and getting the gate ready for you."

"How did you get into the city in the first place?" McKay asked. He had been very quiet since they entered the room as his brain had to tried to figure out how they managed to take the city without more resistance, long enough that his ego gave in.

"Get going and you might have the chance to find that out yourself" he urged while the city plummeted down towards the planet wide ocean.

Before Rodney had the chance to say anything else Sheppard dragged him out of the room through the door they had entered. With the two out of the room it sealed all entrances and nothing but the city and the ocean below existed for O'Neill as he steadied the city. A few kilometers above the planet he sent more power to the sublight engines and the city slowed in to stop four hundred meters above the surface. With the sensors scanning the planet since they left hyperspace he got precise readings of the entire planet. With a thought he sent the city racing across the surface to an area with large veins of many rare materials Mokar had told him the processing facility lacked. As the city closed in on the location he lowered it until it touched the water. With the city in the water he cut all power to the engines and it sank below the surface for half a minute while the water flowed around the shield and the city bleed of speed into the water. Then the city's ballast shifted and she rose back to the same level she had had on both Lantea and New Lantea.

* * *

Shortly after the city had settled and the waves around the city had died the gate activated and Jumper One flew through. Six seconds later the gate activated again and a second jumper arrived in the city, then again a few minutes later as Jumper One returned.

When Jumper One landed in the jumper bay O'Neill was waiting for them along with Mokar and Teal'c. The Alterran in a more elaborately designed white jacket and plain white pants while the other two had the white Lantean standard clothes.

"We have the package Sir" Sheppard reported with a large grin after he and McKay stepped out of the jumper.

"There's no real use though, she's trapped in the nanite body and you'd have to grow her a new body which is ridiculously hard and then you'd have to transfer her consciousness in the new body" McKay explained as they hauled the Asuran body of Dr. Weir out of the jumper and onto a floating Alterran stretcher. Then a light seemed to go up inside his mind. "You can do that can't you? Grow a new body for her?"

"Of course I can" Mokar said. He touched the stretcher which begun to float away. "I will have to build a new facility unless the Lanteans installed such facilities in the city after my creator ascended."

"You'll need my help." McKay stretched himself to full length and inhaled so much that Sheppard expected him to burst. "I'm an expert in Ancient systems, Nanites and the city. If there's a lab I know where it is, and I can create an interface between the nanites and her mind, it's new, so it might take me so time. A day, two at most."

"If that is something you would like to to then you may do so McKay." With a wave of his hand in the direction of the stretcher Mokar stopped it. "We will need her on her feet in a week, you will have three days to find the equipment we will need to grow a body."

"Plenty of time then." The arrogance was flowing from every opening in McKay's body as he took the stretcher and left the room.

"You can count on Rodney, he'll get it done" Sheppard said when the former had left the room.

"I do hope so, at least it will be another thing lifted from my shoulders." He motioned for them to follow. "Am I correct in assuming the two ships which have landed on the piers of the city are ships of war?"

"Yes, they're two of our BC-304s, the Apollo and the Sun Tzu, they took heavy damage fighting the Wraith" said O'Neill.

"Then they're in need of repairs?" He let his shoulders drop and sighted. "It seems everything is at the moment."

"Yes, rather heavy repairs too."

"That is unfortunate." They walked down the stairs into the control room. As he touched a few buttons on one of the consoles a holographic screen flashed to life above it and showed the output of the lifesigns detector. "Something or someone survived on those ships, if you're with us, like McKay seems to be, Sheppard, I would like you to secure those ships. Teal'c and four of the Angelo will come with you."

"Yes Sir" Sheppard said after a nod of approval from O'Neill. "However I do not think Rodney's is on any side Sir, it's more likely he got so excited he forgot about the change in leadership."

"You answer to O'Neill just like before Sheppard, only now I ask him to do things." Teal'c handed Sheppard a bag. "You'll find basic Alterran infantry equipment in that bag. And do not call me Sir, the Alterra do not use such titles."

"I will figure out something else to call you" Sheppard teased before Teal'c motioned towards four of the Angelos who stood nearby.

"We've got an errand to run, so we'll be back in a few hours" O'Neill said as they split up and he and Mokar made for the gate which was already dialling.


	15. Chapter 15

**A/N: Input, ideas and questions are always welcome.**

From above a jumper sank down and parked in front of the gate for O'Neill and Mokar to enter. "I take it you've filled Teal'c in on everything?" asked O'Neill.

"As much as I thought was necessary, he does not need to know of everything that is happening. But I had to give him the same genetic treatment as I gave you, his body was rejecting the substance you gave him. It was the only way to save him from a certain death." Together they walked into the cockpit. "He was more than happy to accept it and get a second chance to kick the Goa'uld to the curb. Even if it will take a few months before we start with that."

"Well then, let's see what luck we have with that shipyard of yours" said O'Neill. He took the controls and the jumper slid through the gate.

On the other side of the gate a gate room identical to that of the Potentia factory waited for them. With a light hand O'Neill moved the jumper over to the control room while Mokar removed one of the Naquadah generators from his bag. With the jumper parked O'Neill extended the shield outwards through the control room, then they stepped out and into the control room.

The control room had the console which controlled the inflow aimed towards the gate and in front of a smashed window two other consoles stood, one with a cracked screen. "Looks like you could use a house cleaner here." While O'Neill looked out through the window Mokar changed the drained Potentia for the generator. As soon as the generator powered up, a forcefield covered up the broken window and the ventilation system begun to pump fresh air into the room.

"Most of our facilities could use a cleaning O'Neill, but first they need to be restored to working order." After putting the drained potentia in his bag Mokar picked on the gate console. "See what you can find on the consoles, they should let you access the drydocks."

"Where are we really?" O'Neill asked when the console with an intact screen powered up. But his focus was not on it but on the other side of the broken window where a light blue star covered most of the visible space, a single black dot contrasted against its surface. Stretching out on both sides and looping behind the star were two unbroken lines of asteroids.

"We are in the Athyl system, it is the one place where there is still have a working DHD inside a shipyard. The shipyard is spread out into the asteroid belt to hide it, each module is powered by a potentia and it uses a transport system similar to that of Atlantis."

"Well then lets see what Athyl has for us." He dove into the information on the console for a minute. "So if I'm reading this right then sections one through five were building Eulogates."

"Fighters, automated of course."

"Right, well at least twenty seems to have been placed in storage."

"It's a start. Continue."

"Section six built Necits, seven built Nerands and eight through ten build something called a Thrameus. Nothing in storage."

"It's a shame. We could have used some capital ships." "We will have to see if those Eulogates are still in storage."

"Lead the way."

"Take the jumper, the transports will not work as long as only this facility is powered. Still it should send the waypoints to the jumper."

"Where is the way out then?"

"Through the roof."

With a loud bang a drone blew a hole in the roof and Mokar watched the jumper rise out of the room. Sighting quietly he begun a complete system diagnostic.

* * *

"General O'Neill, I didn't think we'd see you out here" Lorne said as they returned from the shipyard.

"And I didn't think I'd have to come and rescue Atlantis by myself" O'Neill said with a laugh. A rather large group of people had been gathered in the gate room and on the small balcony above Teal'c was standing guard.

"Sorry about that Sir, they got the drop on us and managed to use the shield to stun us like Michael did with the jumper."

"Yes, yes, most likely they copied the design and put it straight into the shield of the 304s." Zelenka pushed himself past Lorne. "Rodney and I did some research about how to do that should we ever need to."

"How many did you find Teal'c?" O'Neill shouted up to his friend.

"Thirty four. The Goa'uld managed to kill some before we could save them."

"The junior staff has been returned to Earth Sir, guess they thought the rest of us too dangerous to let go" Lorne informed.

"We will have them back here soon enough Lorne." O'Neill climbed up the stairs with Mokar and turned to face the crowd. "Here's the deal, this is Mokar. Everyone say hello and wave. He's the reason we pulled your collective ass out of the fire so if he orders you to do something you do it as if it was an order coming straight from me, no goofing around people, you can do that after we get Earth back. When that time has come you can return home or you can come with us but until then you are all forcefully recruited and if you do resist we will put you in a cell."

"Thank you General O'Neill" Mokar said and motioned for him to stand back. "As I've understood it there are many warriors and scientists among you. Your skills will be appreciated and utilised as best we can, you will most likely have to learn many new things, but I promise you knowledge of the universe. Everyone else will be used as best we can.

At the moment we have two main projects, a team of engineers will need to start repairs to the two ships, I want a list of everything you will need to repair them, by the end of the day. If you think a system should be replaced rather than repaired I will need to know about it right away.

The second is the repairs to this city. She has suffered great damage both under the rule of the Lanteans and the time you have spent here. Still, given the things you had at your disposal I am happy to see that it has fared as good as it has. Still many of the secondary systems have been damaged and I would like the other engineers to compile a list of things you will need to restore things to full functionality.

We will bring the city back to Alterran standards so I will upload the original schematics of the city to the database rather than the current ones which contains changes and alterations made by the Lanteans. Still if you find something you believe we should keep I will consider your request. As for the rest of you, go back to normal duties and your superiors will inform you of any changes."

* * *

"How's it going?" Sheppard asked as he walked into the Alterran lab McKay had dedicated to the transfer of Wier's consciousness.

"Badly, one week and I haven't even been able to separate her mind from the Asuran programming" McKay replied. He was sitting next to the table where Weir's Asuran body was positioned.

"Does the fact that Earth will be invaded by the Jaffa and possibly destroyed by the Goa'uld help?" Sheppard joked.

McKay sighted. "Not really." Next to him one of the machines puked out sparks and set a chair on fire.

"Time to ask our Ancient for help?" While they talked the fire suppression system used a forcefield to suffocate the fire. It had been one of the first things Mokar had made sure to have repaired with the limited personnel available.

"No, I just need a little more time" McKay said and emptied the cup of Alterran coffee. It was not as good as the coffee native to Terra, but it packed a hell of a lot more of a punch, a cup had kept him up for just over three days. "What's the military doing by the way?"

Sheppard pulled up his shirt to reveal black and blue spot just below his ribs."I just finished up a training session in Alterran basic tactics and I would much rather play paintball with Ronon."

At the mention of the name both men's mod hit the floor. "Any news about them?"

Sheppard simply shook his head. "No, but we've only gone through sixty of the planets they dialled while they were in control."

"And no signs of the Athosians?"

"Nothing."

On the other side of the lab a door opened and Mokar stepped through. "There you are, I was looking for the both of you. How's the transfer going?"

With a flick of his wrist McKay closed the screen. "I just need to sort out a bug with the neural buffer and make sure the quantum portraying works as it should."

"He's got no clue" Sheppard said with a laugh.

"I can hear that myself. Neither of those are used in the transfer."

"Look, I just need a little more time."

"We might have the time, but Terra does not." With one hand Mokar placed a button shaped device on either side of her head. "I will take over from here McKay, go with Sheppard. O'Neill is in need of an escort and someone who can pull a diagnostic from Lantean systems."

"Where are we going?"

"A Lantean production facility which seems to have survived the war, I want it up and running if possible. Otherwise we will have to scavenge what we can from it and destroy the remains."

Sheppard frowned. "I thought you said everything was destroyed in the war Rodney?"

"The database claimed so" Rodney said defensively.

"The Lanteans seems to have added a list of all destroyed facilities to their database, there is a far longer list in the Alterran database. It is mostly the same there too, but I have managed to pinpoint a few which seem to have survived."

McKay's jaw dropped. "There's more in there?"

"Yes. Certains things which only the Alterra needed to know. And you are not allowed to look through it." An ice cold gaze told McKay not to debate it. "Now get moving, they are waiting for you." With reluctant steps McKay walked away while Sheppard lit up at the thought of having something to do.

When he was alone Mokar touched the stretcher between Weir and the table which slowly rose to follow him. It would not fit inside the transporters so he touched the communications badge attached to his shirt and had one of the ships transport him and the stretcher down to the edge between Lantean and Alterran territory. As it were the Tau'ri had managed to get into the Lantean area but he had fixed that, now only Teal'c and O'Neill could get there and further down into the bowels of the city only he could get.

It was into the deepest parts of the Alterran section he made his way. As he walked the design of the corridors changed slightly and when he reached the lab he had readied many days earlier he could see the patterns and colours they had used when they fled from Freya, their original home galaxy. The walls around him and the lab itself was just as old as the design, even if it had been repurposed many times over the millennia the walls were still the same as the day Atlantis had risen from Ortus Mallum. Luckily the lab had been equipped with the latest Alterran equipment, which was a few million years old but still the best.

Along one wall a growing tube of grey-blue metal sat. From it cables and hoses wound their way into adjacent rooms. Along the upper third of the tube a glass cover allowed visual checks on the subject. The Alterra had more or less revered these halls and despite their need to have as much as possible hidden they had refused to destroy these old walls to hide their technology. So much of the original ship had been retained that it was essentially a ship within the city-ship, if needed they could use the ship after the city was destroyed.

The tube was not what he headed for though, it was the stasis pod with the freshly grown body of Elizabeth Weir in her thirties. He had already attached the same button shaped device to its head while he moved it from the tank to the pod. While all organs functioned as they should the brain would not send any signals and the stasis pod was needed to keep the body from dying.

As the stretcher moved over to him he prepare the second stasis pod in the room for the Asuran body, it was not a real body so he needed to change the configuration slightly.

On the other side of the lab a door opened and the scientist Mokar had brought down to repair the equipment stepped out. "I think we're ready to proceed" she said as he walked over to one of the consoles in the room.

"Good. I have calibrated the stasis field to keep the Asuran in the same state it is already in." He heaved the Asuran into the pod and activated it, sealing it inside.

"Standing by to activate."

With a nod Mokar gave his permission. She pressed a series of buttons and a second later the first pod shut down and Weir feel into Mokar's arms. "Elizabeth. Relax and let your instincts take over."

For several minutes all three stood there in silence, Mokar holding Weir and the scientist monitoring her status from the console just in case, then she spoke. "Where am I? Who are you?"

"You are in Atlantis Elizabeth, among friends. My name is Mokar" he said calmly.

To Mokar's surprise Weir pressed herself away from him and steadied herself against the wall. "Is that you Ellen?"

The surprise that sounded in Weir's voice was reflected in both of the ladies faces. "Yes Mam, did not think you would recognise me."

A short chuckle escaped her throat. "I hand picked everyone of you for this expedition, I couldn't forget a single one of you if I tried too."

"There is much you have missed, but time is short. As we speak we are preparing the troops we have for an invasion or rather a reclamation" said Mokar while he shut down the equipment and remove the button shaped devices from Weir's head. "General O'Neill left an information packet for you in your old office, I suggest you go through it."

"I will help her back to the office." Ellen offered.

Mokar nodded and drove them out of the lab. "Go, we are on the clock, there is still time, but we do not have long and I want her on Terra as soon as she is able."

* * *

"It'll take me a few hours to crack the encryption" McKay said. He had powered up the console and watched the Ancient text running down the screen.

"Or you follow the instructions on the screen" O'Neill said. He tapped the screen and it changed to show a diagram of the facility.

McKay just stood there baffled. "How did you do that?"

"I followed the instructions. It asked for credentials and I input them" O'Neill explained with a shrug of the shoulders and a smile on his lips. "Mokar gave me and Teal'c one each so he can keep track of our screw ups."

"Then what do you need me for?" McKay complained.

"We can access the consoles, but I don't know how to search through the system."

"Fine, just step back and I'll figure it out." He became quiet for only half a minute before he opened his mouth again. "It's a drone plant."

"You mean like drone weapons?" Sheppard asked in excitement.

"What else could I mean? We could fill up Atlantis twice over with the racks in the storage."

"Good, come on, we have a few more places to visit, we'll need a jumper for the rest."

"General, this is a great find" Sheppard said as they walked towards the gate.

"And we'll be sure to use it, but Mokar gave us plenty of addresses to check out and we only have six hours before the assault."


	16. Chapter 16

**A/N:** has had some problems which means that all reviews posted in the last 3-4 weeks might not have reached me. If you have writen a review to ask me something please do so again so I can answer it for you. /MWB

"Security to the gate room." General Landry shouted. His eyes flashed in annoyance. The gate had dialled just a few moments ago and before his eyes the iris of the gate went from grey, to red, to orange, to vaporised in a matter of seconds. The excess energy tore through the gate room and burnt two centimeters in the wall and four into the glass, but not through to the control room.

Five SG teams ran into the gate room. A hail of small blue bolts ripped through the gate and mowed them down. Four men in Atlantis uniforms came through the gate with Alterran rifles pressed to their shoulder. They came down to the base of the ramp and split up in pairs to secure one door each. Then they reported back and twelve more men came through before the gate shut down.

Taking point Major Lorne lead his four men out of the gate room on one side while Major Teldy led her men up the other side. The last four men stayed in the gate room and begun to set up a defensible position if they needed to fall back.

They had seen General Landry flee when they cleared the gate room but they found no signs of him or anyone else in the control room. With the touch of a button Lorne transmitted a subspace signal. Twenty six seconds later the gate activated again and a single jumper came through.

-Good work Majors- Sheppard said over the radio. He backed the jumper into the, again, inactive gate and ripped it from its bearings.

"Thank you Colonel" came the reply from Lorne. With the gate loose Sheppard let it drop to the floor and the four men in the gate room latched it to the underside of the jumper. He cloaked the jumper and hurried up through the shaft which lead to the surface, four drones fired before hand had opened up the large blast shield which sealed the old missile silo during normal operations.

-Remember not to risk too much Majors, free those you can and make sure to keep the jamers up until the Apollo's ready for you.-

"Yes Sir, we have our orders."

-See you in in Antarctica then, Sheppard out- he said as he put his foot down and the jumper broke through the sonic barrier and raced across the surface of Terra.

* * *

Another bang sounded from the corridor outside, the fifth in four minutes. Twenty seconds later she heard the door next to her's open and two seconds later another bang sounded from the corridor followed by something heavy slumping against the wall separating her cell from the one next to her's.

She knew well what was coming and there was nothing she could do to stop it this time. She was bound to the chair facing the door with both rope and some sort of forcefield, most likely Goa'uld designed. She had managed to free her hands from the ropes, but the forcefield stopped her from doing anything with them.

Finally the door swung open. Sergeant Walter and General Landry were standing on the other side with a pistol each. Without a word Walter walked up to the wall. The forcefield shut down and Landry raised the gun. He fired at her. She was already moving. They had only tied her hands behind her back to the chair and with the forcefield down she ducked to the right and swung the chair around her, sending it into the two men.

The chair flew and Landry raised one of his arms. It only graced him while one of the legs hit Walter in the head. Landry raised the gun again but she was there and drove a knee into his family jewels. She drove him into the corridor but he did not bend over like she expected him to, instead he slammed her against the wall with a bang. When he released some of the pressure on her chest she drove her heels into the wall behind and pushed. Again they hit the wall with a bang. This time it came from the pistol in his hand. She felt a sharp sting in her neck.

* * *

"Sheppard here, I'm approaching the outpost." He flew over a mountain ridge and saw the hole in the ice.

-Good to hear from you Colonel. The Apollo left for the SGC only minutes ago- Weir replied over the radio.

"We'll have to inform them to stay a little higher next time. The jumper detected them through a vortex behind the ship."

-You can tell them yourself when they return John- He lowered down the narrow shaft to the outpost.

"I'll be sure to do that." He put down the gate at an angle and wiggled the gate back around the jumper. Then he moved deeper into the facility to where Mokar had wanted the gate.

-Leave the jumper inside until Zelenka can have the shield installed.-

"You sure? I thought they would be sending more things through?"

-We want both shields operational before we bring a ZPM here.-

"Makes sense." Sheppard walked out of the jumper in full combat gear.

"It was O'Neill's suggestion" Weir said. She waited for him at the end of the jumper's ramp.

"So what now? Any new orders?"

"You can go help them install the new control chair, Beckett's having a hard time activating it."

"I'll see what I can do." He said and hesitated for a moment right next to her. Then he locked his arms around her. "It's good to have you back."

"It's good to be back Colonel." She stated and let the hug last for many more seconds before she broke free. "Of you go now, we can catch up later when we are not trying to save Earth."

* * *

"She's waking up" Someone shouted. Inside her head spikes of pain complained about the volume.

"Quiet down will you" she sneered.

"Sorry Colonel" the voice whispered right next to her ear as she was lifted up.

"We have secured Colonel Carter, Dr. Jackson, Sergeant Walter and twelve of the SG teams inside the base Sir" someone else said and she could hear the click of a radio.

-Have you tagged the bodies too?- a voice returned over the radio.

"Everything's good to go Sir, we're barely holding of the airmen stationed on the higher levels so we'd appreciate a quick extraction."

-Standby for beaming.- There was a white light and when she forced her eyes open Jack was there to support her.

"Helm, turn the ship around and get us back to base" he ordered. She could see the mountain flying by the viewport as the ship swung around its axis and accelerated away while it cloaked.

"What's happening Jack?" she asked. The ship shot forward over Colorado and approached New Mexico.

"All in due time Carter" he said. One of his hands stroked her hair and as he held her close she felt the rhythmic beating of his heart. Then he looked over her shoulder. "Get her down into the mess so she can get some proper food Sergeant."

"Yes Sir" a woman said and motioned for Carter to follow.

"Get some food and sleep Sam" O'Neill ordered, leaving no room for discussion.

* * *

"Try it now" McKay said. His head was buried in a hole in the platform on which the control chair sat.

"Which one?" Sheppard asked from the control chair as he leaned back and the chair finally activated.

"Both should work."

"No no no, start with the gate shield, it drains much less power." Zelanka demanded. In his hand was a datapad and on it large amounts of data scrolled by as he tried to get readings on the chair.

"Gate it is then." Sheppard said and concentrated on the newly installed system. As the chair connected to the shield generator it performed a quick diagnose. It took a few seconds, then the shield formed around the gate and the jumper parked inside it.

"Looks like we can remove the jumper then" Weir said from where she stood by the ring platform.

"Go right ahead, you could use the training" Sheppard said. He shut of the small shield and begun to activate the larger dome shield around the outpost.

"I don't have the gene John" she said with her typical laugh.

"Oh, right. Sorry to correct you about your own body, but it seems that O'Neill convinced our resident Ancient to give you an upgraded body while he was at it. I'm due for the same upgrade in a few days."

"Really?" she asked slightly amused. Still she walked over to the jumper.

As Sheppard raised the dome shield systems dormant for millions of years started again, working flawlessly after all the time under the ice. When the shield had formed completely, cutting through the thick ice, the heat turned on. In seconds the temperature rose and the ice begun to melt.

"Uh, you might want to turn down on the heat slightly. Not that I'm complaining about it or anything but we'll drown if that ice melts" Rodney cautioned.

"I don't think we'll have to worry about that Rodney, the chair's using the shield to melt the ice from above too, at most we'll get a little wet." He saw the jumper rising from the ground and ripping the gate with it as it rose into the icy roof.

With a thought he forced the jumper and Weir down to the ground before she could do any more damage.

* * *

When the Apollo returned to the outpost the shield had burned away a large circle in the ice which a radius of several kilometers. As the warship lowered towards the ground the shield shifted to let them through. About the same time as it touched down the gate activated and Mokar came through with two hover sleds in tow.

"Is that the living quarters?" O'Neill asked. He and Carter had just beamed down into the outpost where Mokar had set up the construction equipment and a second shield had formed around the area.

"No" Mokar said just as a diagram was projected into the air. "Since Atlantis stood here most of the time we never expanded the outpost to full size, these will be the basic factories. Sadly I'm using the last of the nanites I have to construct this. We will need to construct a lab capable of creating more unless you want to build the rest of the outpost by hand and jumper."

"There's a lab on Atlantis which can create repli..." Carter begun but then bit her tongue. "They're not replicators are they?"

"Nanites, not replicators or Asurans" Mokar corrected. "We only use them to move the pieces to the places instructed by the base controller and then merge them together. They do not communicate with each other, only with the controller and are therefore unable to take on more advanced forms. Though I have to admit the Asurans are an interesting pieces of technology, there might still be promise within them, even if the Lanteans did most of the development."

"We've seen them rebuild at an incredible pace, I'll admit they could be useful, but the Asurans were a large threat to everything in the galaxy" Carter objected. "Not to mention the fact that the replicators fought by the Asgard and later us were even more deadly."

"And I agree that it can not be allowed to happen again, still it could serve to replace the workforce we need." He looked her deep in the eyes. "O'Neill have said many things about you, among other things he mentioned your brain as one of your worlds largest assets. You have seen the threat caused by both of these replicators and you would seem critical to any development of new ones."

"Yes of course, they're a plague in many galaxies" Carter said. In front of them the hover sleighs deposited the parts and the grey mist begun to move the parts into place, starting from the bottom and building upwards. "Still I see your point, you can have a small factory assembled in a matter of hours with nanites if you have the parts. A nanite replicator could potentially take the material straight out of the ground and process them on site to whatever you would need."

"O'Neill's already told me that you'll be joining our ranks so how about you take care of the development of the next generation of replicators? You're critical enough about them that you won't let them out of the test phase before you're absolutely sure they will never end up being a plague again."

Carter frowned. "I guess so." The machinery inside the first factory was covered inside a building. "But that could very well mean you will have to wait a decade or two before I'll sign off on them."

"I understand, you will have all the time you need to complete them, even if we have a fully functional workforce by the time you finish they can still be used in hazardous environments." He said and he led them towards the gate. "O'Neill. I entrust the outpost in your hands, I will have Sheppard relieve you when he gets here in the Sun Tzu. Or possibly Major Lorne if we can repair the Lantean warship, there's still the expedition to Thuvalan, Caari, Sar and Lega which will need an experienced commander."

"The last diagnose didn't tell you anything more?" O'Neill asked as Sheppard joined them by the gate.

"Nothing more, so far I only know that there's something strange with several of the gates and DHDs in Caari. The facilities in the other galaxies are responding but neither the gate nor the DHD is there anymore" Mokar said as he dialled the gate back to Atlantis.

"Just make sure the ship's back here before the shooting starts" O'Neill said before he patted him on the shoulder.

"If it is possible I will have her here long before that."


	17. Chapter 17

"This is the Lantefying chamber" Mokar said. He lead Sheppard and Carter inside the lab he and O'Neill had set up on Atlantis simply because the later didn't think Gamia was a pleasant planet.

"Lantefying?" Sheppard raised an eyebrow as they entered the room. It was split in two, to the left was an Alterran control console on a slightly raised podium protected by a force field, the same kind used to separate Lantean and Alterran sections in the city. To the right a staircase lead down to an open area with nothing else there.

"O'Neill came up with the name" Mokar said. "He thinks Lanteans would be more useful to us and I agree, so we had this section rebuilt to the Lantefying section so we can 'upgrade' more than one at a time. We can treat thirty humans at the same time here, but for now it's just the two of you."

"So what do we do?" Carter asked.

"Go down there and wait, it will take an hour at most." He crossed over to the console above.

"We're just going to stand here?" Sheppard asked. While they stood there two force fields formed around them and pushed them into a corner.

"No, over there. The first and second spots are beneath your feet and you'll need to stay inside the fields or the transformation could end badly."

After five minutes Rodney came running into the room with a face as red as a tomato. "Come on. You couldn't wait for me?" Rodney complained. Sheppard had never seen him so sweaty.

"Did you really run Rodney?" Sheppard asked. Next to him Carter raised an eyebrow in disbelief.

"Are you kidding me? I wouldn't miss this for the world, the chance to become an Ancient, priceless."

"To bad you're late then" Sheppard mocked.

"He can be processed separately" Mokar corrected. "You'll be done a while after them. Just step down and I'll deal with you."

"Really?" Rodney said, his face cracking up in a wide smile.

* * *

"Here you go General" the doctor said and handed O'Neill a note.

"I didn't think you'd be done so soon" O'Neill replied and looked down on it.

"It's not hard to determine the cause of death when there's a bullet sitting inside their brains. It's been proven to be fatal many times."

He frowned. "They were executed?"

"Aye everyone were, both Colonel Mitchell and Vala were among the victims. All but the last one."

"General Landry." O'Neill read of the bottom of the note. "Killed at close range by nine millimeter bullet along with symbiote toxin. He was a Goa'uld?"

"Unless the Tok'ra's begun killing their hosts, aye."

"Have you checked for any more of the slimy bastards?"

"Aye. As far as I can tell he was the only one, the rest were brainwashed but the stunners seem to have broken that."

"Keep them in the medbay for now Carson, I don't want to have anyone of them breaking out and causing trouble."

* * *

"And there we go. Three new Lanteans, the computer should already have reserved new rooms for you in the Lantean section" Mokar said while the forcefield around McKay shut down and he joined the other two.

"O'Neill said something about access codes" McKay said with glaring eyes.

"You'll be given them when you need them. Personally you'll be returning to Earth McKay, they will need a technical advisor when they build the outpost."

"Really?" McKay complained. "I get Lantefied and that's what I get to work with?"

"All in due time Rodney" Sheppard eased. "I'm sure there will be some project for you to sink some spare time into. Right?"

"Many thing will need to be done as Sheppard say, but right now we need the outpost so we can organise the defense of Terra."

"Can I pack some personal things first?"

"Take the time you need, Chuck's ready to dial the gate when you're ready to return."

"You sure there isn't anything here on Atlantis you need my help with, there's plenty of things to repair."

"Go Rodney, he told you to go to Earth, so go" Sheppard scolded.

"I guess I should get going then?" Sheppard asked.

"Not yet." Mokar motioned for the two to follow him out of the room and across the hall into a much smaller lab. "Since you're bringing the Tria back here you will need to have an understanding of the systems."

"So I guess that's what the headsucker is meant for?" Sheppard motioned for the wall furthest away.

"Neural interface" Mokar corrected. "But yes, I will download some of my knowledge into its data banks and it will be downloaded into your mind."

"So you control the amount of data?" Carter asked.

"Yes, I chose what you will get and the amount you receive" Mokar said as he worked the neural interface. "There is already finished neural downloads, but they are meant for Alterran or Lantean minds, it will take your bodies time to reach that level. So I am creating these two after your minds."

"Is it safe?" Carter asked.

"I would not do it if I did not think it was" Mokar said as he stepped away from the machine. "Sheppard goes first, then you Carter."

"Here goes nothing" he said and shoved his head into the neural interface. Half a second later he fell to the ground but got up just as quick. "Wow."

"Anything good in there?" Carter asked as she tapped his head.

"It's amazing. I could built the Tria from scratch with this" he said as he moved out of the way so Carter could have a go. After hesitating for just a second she stepped up and let the light wash over her. The light continued for almost eight seconds, then she fell down on the floor with limp limbs.

Sheppard knelt down next to her when she stayed down. "What happened?"

"The information she needed was far greater than what you were given which led to much higher stress within her brain, it most likely shut off to protect itself" Mokar explained while she begun to move.

"There's so much in here, it feels like it's going to cause my brain to have a meltdown" she complained as she scraped herself of the floor with the help of Sheppard.

"Yes, the Alterra mostly used a manual workforce and therefore we did not do much research with nanites and replicators. The Lanteans seem to have gone the other way after the last of us died or Ascended, they did an incredible amount of research into the subject. I have not yet been able to go through it all myself."

"But still the way they did it, it is incredibly simple and safe" she said, then her mood jumped off a cliff. "Until they built the Asurans. They did not think them through at all did they?"

"No. The Lantean database is not entirely clear on the timeline" Mokar admitted. "But I figure less than two weeks is a good estimate."

"Two weeks?" Sheppard asked in surprise. "I would have thought it took them years to do."

"They already had replicators John" Carter said as he mind hyper processed the knowledge to find what she wanted. "They used the old design and changed the programming to be more aggressive, I could simply revert back to the old design. Of course I will have to add some extra safety parameters."

"You are correct, but I will leave that to you Carter" he said before turning to Sheppard. "I think it is time for you to go, they are waiting for you and time is not something we have in abundance at the moment."

"West pier right?"

"Yes."

"Nanite lab?" she guessed when Mokar led her out of the lab and down one of the halls.

"No, I have had everything you need moved to a lab with higher security." They stepped into a transporter. "It is where such research should be done."

* * *

"Off world activation" a man shouted from the makeshift control room where he could control the gate's shield and the dialling. "We're not receiving IDC."

"Raise the shield" Weir instructed. Before she could find a working radio O'Neill stepped up and stopped her hand.

"They're friendlies" he said and removed a hand from the DHD. Some additional augmentation by Mokar had allowed him to use the DHDs in the same way a true Alterran could.

"You know that for sure?" she said as the shield vanished.

"Yes" he said as Teal'c came through the gate along with forty men who were all dressed in the SG uniform.

"You've done some redecoration in the gate room Jack?" a voice asked. He knew it belonged to the Major leading SG-32, a man he had hand picked for the task after the first siege of Atlantis.

"It was too modern Major. We chose to go with an Ancient style" O'Neill replied before grabbing Teal'c and moving away a short distance. "I hope you did as I told you?"

"Indeed. I have stunned all of them in case any of them were brainwashed."

"Good. I'll be taking the Apollo to pick up some people Dr. Weir wants to return so keep them in line until then."

"I will see to it O'Neill" he said as O'Neill disappeared in a white light.

* * *

"Kofi" Weir said as she approached her friend who sat below a tree.

"Elizabeth. I were told you had been killed half a decade ago" he replied as he looked up. "Imagine my surprise when you ask me to meet you."

"Sometime things are exaggerated" she said while looping her arm around his and leading him away. They had met in a park outside his hometown, yet she did not think they were safe. "But I do admit I thought my time had come a few years ago."

"Last I heard you were doing some top secret work within the military, I did not think you would be the one to abandon the cause for the military."

"Sometimes ideals have to be given up for the larger things" she said as they crossed over a stream on an old stone bridge. Without one more word she grabbed a firm hold of him and before he could react they were walking over the side of the bridge. "Like the fate of our planet or something similar."

"This is one of the gate ships from the alien city in another galaxy, correct?" he asked as they crossed into the cloaked jumper Elizabeth had taken to the meeting.

"Yes, we call them jumpers" she said as she slid in behind the controls and motioned for him to sit down next to him. "But I did not come here to brag about this. I take it you are aware of the current situation?"

"Yes how could I miss it? An alien species taking control of both American continents and many larger cities around the globe, even if I am no longer the Secretary-General of the United Nations I could not miss such a thing."

"Both? Out intel said only the united states had been compromised."

"Things move fast Elizabeth, your intel could be no more than a week old."

"Do you know who their leader is?"

"Enap. Or at least that is the name that has been leaking out."

"Perhaps Daniel will know more about him" she said as a blue outline formed in front of them.

"What is that?" he asked as they sliced through the cloaking field into the hangar of the Apollo.

"Welcome to the Apollo" she said as the jumper touched down. "There is much we need to talk about and little time."

"What would you ask of me Elizabeth?" he said as they strode out into the hangar.

"To help me secure Earth" she said. She pressed the transmit button on her radio. "Jack, we're on board, you're good to go."

-We are going- Jack replied as the ship accelerated away.

"From the aliens?" he asked.

"Yes, they're called the Goa'uld. You should know who they are since you seem to know about the jumpers" she answered.

"I know who they are" he confirmed.

"Then things will be much simpler" she said as they left the hangar behind and headed for the rings. "In under two weeks we think a second alien fleet will be arriving to eliminate the first, we hope they will destroy each other while the militaries around the globe take out any Jaffa left on the ground or in the air."

"Two weeks is far too little time to draft a treaty of unification Elizabeth. Leaders have tried to unite the countries of Earth many times, but it can not be done." They stepped inside the rings which flew up from the floor and washed them in a white light.

"That is what we have Kofi, if we do not then many more will die." The rings lowered and they were left in the Antarctic outpost. "I imagine you still have much pull within the political world, as do I. They will listen and we will point them at the Goa'uld."

* * *

"That's a big hole" Zelenka commented as he and a team of engineers were lead around a walkway.

"Yes, it is where the outposts fit when one is built beneath the city" Mokar replied as they walked around the hole. "I've tried to start up the equipment for a while now but I do not have the time to personally repair it."

"Which is where we come in" Zelenka guessed as they were lead into a room.

"Yes, our more advanced technology requires plenty of rare substances, many of which have been exhausted in our old mining facilities, this world contains most of what we need."

"We'll do our best" Zelenka promised as the team fanned into the room and begun their work.

"Use this if there is anything you need." Mokar handed him an Alteran communicator. "I will have to leave the city a number of times over the coming days, but this should be able to reach me as long as I do not leave the galaxy."

"I'm sure we can solve this by ourselves, otherwise we will call up the blueprints or call you" Zelenka said confidently.

"I am sure you will" Mokar said as he wandered out of the room. They had teams across the city doing repairs, yet this was the first and only team he had allowed in the Alterran section of the city, he did not like them walking around freely in here, but for now he had have to tolerate it if he were to have the systems operational any time soon. For now he needed to check upon the facilities O'Neill, Teal'c, Sheppard and McKay had surveyed a couple of days ago.

* * *

" _Azriel, Nisroc, Alizur"_ Daniel said and greeted each of the Angelos in turn. Mokar had given him a neural download to supplement the holes in his Ancient along with the rest of the basic languages used in the Alterran realm.

" _The Divine has instructed that we be your guards on your journey"_ Azriel said. They took up position around Daniel who stood in front of the active gate.

" _Come then, we have many places to visit"_ he said as he stepped through the gate. He disliked having soldiers with him on diplomatic missions, but he wasn't about to argue with a bunch of angels, an Alteran and most likely Jack.

As an ascended Asuran Elizabeth had come into contact with several advanced civilisations and Mokar had thought it wise to establish contact as soon as possible. With Elizabeth busy trying to piece Earth together the lot had fallen on Daniel and he had picked it up like a kid getting a new toy for christmas.


	18. Chapter 18

"How come you're the one getting to do this General?" Sheppard asked. He was lying on the cold hard floor of the Apollo's hangar acting as O'Neill's spotter.

"Because I called dibs on it a month ago." He changed his aim slightly. In his hands was the Alterran equivalent of a sniper rifle.

"Still. I think everyone should be allowed to press the button and bom goes the president."

"Oh, I'd love to blow that man to pieces, trust me Colonel" Jack said and squeezed the trigger. "But there's a good chance we'd end up with plenty of collateral damage too."

"Didn't think of that" Sheppard admitted.

"So how far out is the Sun Tzu?"

"Fifteen minutes Sir, Lorne's coming in with the Tria just under a minute before the Jaffa fleet" Sheppard reported and checked his watch. "The Jaffa fleet should be here in five minutes."

"Good. Let's hope things go to plan." He pressed back the trigger. From the front of the rifle a white stream of plasma rushed, it did not last more than a twentieth of a second but the effect was immediate. What had been a living and breathing man a second before became a dead husk as a hole the size of a clinical needle was created clean through the neck. The moment the plasma stream punctured the skin it released all of it's energy straight into the nervous system and fried everything.

"Hit and kill" Sheppard confirmed as the man fell head first onto his desk.

"Good" O'Neill said as he stood up and sent an order to the bridge. "Now prepare the Sun Tzu for combat. We'll need her able and ready."

"Of course" Sheppard replied as the hologram around him faded. He was back in the holo room onboard the Sun Tzu. With a press on the ear mounted radio he activated it. "What's our status?"

-ETA fourteen minutes- the helm replied.

"Make that ten and you'll all be on my good side."

-Sir, do you have any idea how hard it would be to make this ship go any faster. We've already plugged in a ZPM and we're running on Asgard hyperdrives-

"No clue really, but you seem to know, so why don't you give it a try." Sheppard said as he came into the bridge and sat down in the Alterran control chair which had been installed in lieu of the Tau'ri made captain chair.

"Yes, Sir" the tech said as he begun to work the controls at his station.

* * *

Inside a newly constructed building in Antarctica Weir watched as a holographic message blinked into view. "Generals." She looked around at the hundred or so holograms in the room. "The time to strike has come, the enemy's leader has been killed and they are weak."

"The Chinese forces stand ready to strike, the enemy will be dead before the sun sets."

"So does the Russian forces."

"And the British."

"And the Swish."

"There's is no use telling me gentlemen" she said calmly. "Go and show the Goa'uld your resolve."

"We will see to it ma'am" a suave looking man said before he begun to fade away. Moments after the others followed under many forms of promises and traditional battle cries.

"Lets hope things go our way now" Kofi said from behind her.

"The Jaffa and the Goa'uld are formidable enemies, but this is our planet and if they want it they will have to pay a high price for it" she said steadfast while a hologram begun to count down from sixty seconds.

"I'd much rather they didn't want it." They returned to the chair room just as the clock reached zero. Above the chair a hologram of the fleet above the planet flashed into existence just in time to show the arrival of the Jaffa fleet. "Dr. Beckett, I hope you're standing by with the drones."

"Aye." He replied from the chair. "The Russian and Chinese planes have begun to lift of."

"It might be a good idea to give them an escort of drones, we don't want too many losses on our side" she said as saw hundreds of bright lights shoot up from around the outpost.

"That's all we can spare."

"I thought they managed to find a drone factory?" She hadn't had time to take care of the development of the outpost while she and Kofi had been organising Earth's defenses.

"We did" McKay said from around a corner.

"So why don't we have any more drones?"

"Because they didn't work" McKay said and sat down against a wall. "The factory had built hundreds of thousands of them. But someone had sabotaged the software uploaded to the drones. They won't connect to the chairs at all, so we can't use them."

"Why would anyone do that?"

"To stop them from falling into enemy hands I'd guess." He picked himself of the ground and walked up to one of the avenues which spread out from the outpost proper. "Since there's no way of reprogramming them the raw materials were reused, most of the advanced systems in the outpost was built with those resources."

"The Sun Tzu just dropped out of hyperspace on the far side of the moon" Beckett reported and the hologram changed to show the ship.

"Why are they doing nothing?" Kofi asked. He had watched the hologram since they entered the room and since the Jaffa fleet had left hyperspace nothing had happened. Both fleets had stayed in position and except for the deployment of hundreds of gliders there had not been any movement on either side.

"There's a lot of communications going on between the fleets" Beckett said. Without warning every drone in the outpost shot up at top speed. Meanwhile the already deployed drones changed targets from the low going gliders taking off from the ground to the fleets above.

"Carson, what's happening?" Weir asked as the hologram showed the two fleets merging into one, without any shots fired between them.

"This can't be good" McKay muttered.

"Jack, we have a situation here" Elizabeth said into her radio.

-Other than the fact that the Jaffa fleet seem to have lost the war they fought and the other guy sending his fleet here instead?- Came the reply. In the atmosphere their three ships decloaked and from the 304s blue lances reached out and sliced through sixteen of the Ha'taks gathered before their shields had been raised.

"What?"

"We picked up some chatter between the fleets" Jack replied as the Ha'taks split up into three groups with their support crafts diving towards the planet. "We'll need every 302 on the planet up in the air soon."

"I'll relay the order."

* * *

From his control chair O'Neill watched the Asgard plasma beams slice through another set of Ha'taks, then they retaliated and their cannons begun pounding away at his shields. All around the ship Death Gliders and Al'keshs dove down towards the surface and with a thought he tagged them for the railguns, seconds later the gliders begun to light up as the railguns spun into action and peppered the unshielded crafts with bullets.

As the slugging match went on O'Neill was amazed by the events unfolding inside the atmosphere below them. Around the world MiG, F-16, F-22, Eurofighter, J-10 and Jas 39 fighters had taken to the skies and where for the first time flying side by side with each other and other fighters from around the planet against the Death Gliders who rose from two or three places on the surface and the ones who did not get shot down coming from the Ha'taks above. Yet, despite their overwhelming numbers the human fighters were losing badly.

As the plasma beams of the Apollo cut through another set of Ha'taks he saw the shields of the Tria penetrated and the orange plasma bolts of the Ha'taks begun to rip it to shreds. Half a second later the rings aboard the ship sprung to life and then the Sun Tzu joined the Tria as debris raining down onto the planet.

"How are you holding up?" Sheppard asked as he came running onto the bridge.

"Forty one percent and shrinking fast, the Tria and the Sun Tzu soaked up most of the damage" O'Neill said from the control chair.

"Lets hope for the best then" Sheppard said. He slid down in the pilot's seat and begun to run evasive maneuvers to relieve O'Neill's mind. Apart from Sheppard and O'Neilll only a few others had the skill to serve on a starship and most of them had been sent back to the outpost just before the destruction of the other two ships.

"That won't do us any good Sheppard" O'Neill said, just as an orange bolt slipped through the shield and crashed into the hangar they had both been lying in before, one as a hologram and the other in person. Then another and yet another slipped through and their sublight engines failed.

Somewhere deep into his subconscious a thought formed and the control chair picked it up just as it formed. Moments before another barrage of bolts were going to hit the ship a hyperspace window formed and it was gone. Not too far though, just a few hundred million kilometers before the hyperdrive gave up and the ship went tumbling through space.

* * *

"Carson talk to me, what's happening?" Weir ordered as they saw the three friendly ships disappear from the hologram in rapid succession.

"We lost the Sun Tzu and the Tria. Their crews are at the outermost rings."

"And the Apollo?"

"It jumped to hyperspace, but the sensors didn't detect any ships in hyperspace" he said as something came into view at the outermost edge of the sensors and speed towards the planet much faster than any ship could have done. "Something's coming our way, fast."

"Atlantis" she said knowingly as the city shot into the solar system. Suddenly it was in the middle of the severely diminished Goa'uld fleet.

From around the city the Ion pulls cannons begun taking down the hostile shields and then the city rammed them. Apart from the drones and the Ion cannons the city did have other weapons, but after a long time of neglect they would have to be repaired before they could be used, which left using the shield as a battering ram. In mere seconds the number of Ha'taks were reduced to five ships who all jumped away in different directions.

-Dr. Weir what's happened to the ships?- Zelenka's voice came over the radio.

"Radek, you brought the city?" She asked while she studied the hologram which was now focused on the fighters and gliders.

-Yes, or rather our Ancient did, we used the wormhole drive, we'll have to use the stardrive to get back though, don't want to waste more power than we have to-

"The what?" she asked in confusion. "Never mind, it's good that you're here. The Sun Tzu was destroyed along with the Tria. We think the Apollo managed to open a hyperspace window but we never detected it in hyperspace."

-I think Mokar's going to look for it- he said just as the city angled away from the planet and moved away on sublight.

"We could need some help down here, the fighters are losing to the gliders" Weir said. They saw the city hurrying away from the planet.

-There's nothing we can do Elizabeth. We're all out of drones and the gliders are too small and fast for the Ion cannons. Still there might be something, Mokar took everyone who could fly to one of the piers, he might be up to something- Almost as if on his command ten small dots broke away from the city and headed for Earth. -I guess we have fighters now-

"Apparently you do. Are there any jumpers who still have drones?"

-No, all drones that worked as they should were sent to the outpost, we're dry. But if he sent out those fighters then they most likely have some other weaponry, at the very least the sensors detects that they seem to have shields-

"We'll take what we can" she said as the ten fighters broke through the atmosphere and joined the fight.


	19. Chapter 19

"General?" Sheppard asked as he pushed away a console which had landed on his chest. There came no response, but as he sat up he could see the other man still sitting in the control chair. The whole bridge was trashed and most of the loose equipment and the less sturdy things had found their way to the front of the viewport which was cracked, but not broken. The automatic darkening of the glas seemed to have activated too, but it had not deactivated afterwards and all he saw was complete darkness when he looked at it.

After removing some debris from his legs he managed to get up, his legs had taken a beating, but the wounds were already closing themselves. As he hurried over to O'Neill he saw the reason he was still in the control chair, over key points on his body arcs had sprung out of the chair to hold him safely in place. He could see his chest rising and sinking beneath the constraints but there were no signs of damage to him, even if several pipes were sticking out of the chair's back.

Judging the constraints beyond his strength and O'Neill safe for now he got over to one of the still working consoles and pulled up the sensors. The information shown was erratic and he failed to get anything concrete out of it, but there was something moving around outside, that much he could tell. Still they picked up the large planet which the ship was hurling towards at breakneck speed.

"What happened?" O'Neill's voice asked. He spun around to see the restraints retracting and letting go of the man.

"We're safely away from Earth. But something's moving around out there, searching for us no doubt" Sheppard said while he helped O'Neill out of the chair.

"Ouch, careful" O'Neill said. O'Neill could feel his body working its magic to to repair the damage it had suffered, but even his Lantean body had a hard time keeping him alive, let alone repair the damage. "You've got a plan Colonel?"

"Hangar bay, we'll take a 302 and he'd back to Antarctica" Sheppard said as he helped him out of the bridge and into a corridor.

"We'll have to do better than that, we lost both of the hangars and apart from five or six levels the ship's lost all atmosphere" O'Neill said and motioned for his hand which was sending a rain of sparks to the floor from an open wound. "The beacon here would have been a better way."

"I guess it's dead Sir?"

"Yea, it doesn't respond to mental commands any more."

"So where does that leave us then?"

"On a dying ship not too far from a number of angry Ha'taks who's most likely searching for us" O'Neill said happily. "We've been through worse in my fifteen years at the SGC."

"Can't say I haven't been there too Sir, but I've always had my team to back me up" Sheppard said as they shrunk down against a wall.

"Well we're a team now Colonel, let's come up with a plan which gets us of this rust bucket before it either explodes or the Goa'uld come find us" O'Neill said.

* * *

 **A/N:** Next book will be a new story, so subscribe or favorite me as an author so you do not miss it.

* * *

-Viper Command this is Viper Four we're being cut down out here, we need ground support. Over.-

-Viper Four. You are flying over the fucking Atlantic, where the hell would we place ground support? Over.-

-A freaking ship would be ni…-

-Viper Four come in. Over.-

-Wraith Blight One to Viper Command. Viper squadron was just blown to hell. Over.-

-Copy that. Viper Command over and out.-

-W B One to Viper Command, please respond. We're getting some strange readings from heading two four eight, altitude is five hundred klicks and falling rapidly. Over.-

-We read you W B One. We don't have access to anything which can detect things that far out. But anything coming from space is hostile and should be treated as such. Over.-

-This is Sergeant Adams in control of USF One through Five. Do not fire. Over.-

-I read you Sergeant, what's USF? Over.-

-Unmanned Space Fighter. Atlantis is sending her greetings. Over.-

-Holding fire. Over.-

-Private Hill in control of USF Six through Ten to W B One. We need you to transmit the scanning frequencies of the 302s sensors.-

-Might I ask why? We're in the middle of a fucking slaughter. Over.-

-One of our techs are asking for them Sir. I'm in the dark as much as you are.-

-Not sure what use they are to you. Transmitting data now.-

-Thank you W B One. Over.-

-It's not every day you see almost a dussin crafts shooting past you from out of nowhere. Over.-

-Of course W B One. These things don't have much in the way of firepower, but if you can get everyone behind us we'll play tank and you can have the kills. Over.-

-I hear you Private. We'll see to it. Over and out.-

The moment the Alterran fighters came into play the tide of the battle turned around, where before the orange blasts from the gliders had hit the body of the fighters they now stopped against shields which moved around and only stopped those who were at risk of hitting any of the Tau'ri fighters.

Then out of nowhere blue bolts shot out into the gliders, they did little damage on their own but with hundreds fired from each of the ten Alterran fighters each second they bit through the thin hull and caused great damage to the inside of the gliders. From behind their cover the Tau'ri fighter begun to take vengeance for their lost comrades with the 302's and their railguns leading the way. All sorts of guided and unguided missiles begun to fly from the Tau'ri fighters and even if some were shot down by the gliders the sheer number had the same effect as a flamethrower aimed at a swarm of bees. In just over ten minutes the main force of the gliders had been destroyed while only two more fighters had been lost, due to their own recklessness.

With the gliders out of the way the fighters split up to chase down the Al'kesh who had split from the gliders to bomb whatever they could find.

* * *

"You sure you know what you're doing Colonel?" O'Neill asked.

"Never built anything more advanced than a radio in school Sir" Sheppard said as he pulled a control crystal from one of the damaged consoles which was strewn about the bridge.

"Somehow I think this is just a little bit harder to do" O'Neill said as he handed him a bunch of wires he had cut out of a wall panel. They had been stuck on the dead ship for half a day and despite their best efforts the air was running out.

"Yes, a long distance subspace quantum link transreceiver is probably something I'd rather hear McKay say he's going to build than me. But it's what the Tria has installed and therefor it's what I hope I can built since I have the blueprints for the entire ship in my head." He said and tapped a finger to his head.

"You might have that in your head Colonel but it still feels a bit too easy." He motioned for the six or seven things they had pieced together, all taken from systems on the bridge.

"It's surprisingly easy yes, but luckily for us Alterran, Lantean and Asgard communications consoles seems to be almost identical on the inside and this ship is based on Asgard designs."

"So we're hopefully saved because they shared designs with each other?"

"Just speculating Sir." He flipped the switch and the device lith up.

"So is it working?"

"I think it is, we can only hope it finds something to connect to."

* * *

"Dr. McKay, I'm getting some strange responses from this console" a tech said as he stood in front of one of the newly installed consoles in the Antarctic outpost.

"Let me see" McKay said and shoved the man out of the way.

"Is it a message from Atlantis? Have they found John and the General?" Elisabeth asked anxious as she ran up behind him.

"No, that I can tell you right away." He watched as she got even more sad and depressed. "But this is the outposts main communications console, so there has gotta be some kind of message or signal coming through to us."

"Send it to Atlantis, maybe our Alterran friend can figure it out."

"I haven't had a chance to study much of the Ancient language found here in the Milky Way, but this console is using some derivative of Ancient which I'm having a hard time making heads or tails of. Compared to what's used in Pegasus it feels old. But one thing which is the same here and on Atlantis is this symbol." He pointed to a symbol in the lower left corner. "Quantum linking. The best I could do is to try and tape it and send it as a video. Any tampering on this or the other end and everything gets deleted."

"You're right, this is different from what's used in Pegasus" She was looking over his shoulder. "I've read through some of Daniel's work and I'm sure he can translate that for you."

"Well I don't see him around so just give me a little bit of time and I'll have this figured out."

"Fine, but I can't stand it when there's nothing I can do."

"Then help me translate this" he offered.

* * *

"You sure you did it right?" O'Neill asked. They'd been staring at the thing for four hours and he could feel the air thinning out.

"Yes, it's transmitting too, there just doesn't seem to be anyone on the other end" Sheppard replied.

"Time for plan B then."

"What's plan B Sir?"

"Not sure Colonel, but I'm sure we can come up with one."

"We better do it fast Sir, with the way this is going I don't think I can stay lucid more than ten or twenty minutes."

"I can feel it too Colonel, but as we know all SG personnel do their best work under pressure" O'neill said as they felt a tremble through the ship.

"What's that?"

"How should I know? I'm stuck here with you."

"Right, I guess my brain's slowing down now."

"You hear that too?"

"It's our blood pumping in our ears Sir."

"No, that's something else, it's a hissing noise." O'Neill pulled himself of the floor where the two had laid down when the oxygen begun to run low.

In a wall at the back of the bridge a large crack had formed and through it a group of small black orbs slipped through, it was from them the hissing sound came. With the instincts of two career soldiers they drew their sidearms and begun to take them out one by one. When they were destroyed the orbs exploded in a poof of white vapor.

"Gas" Sheppard shouted at the sight of the vapor which sunk down and disappeared as it hit the floor.

"Move it Colonel." O'Neill ordered and together they hurried out of the bridge with the orbs closing in on them.

They ran into a corridor and saw it blocked by an emergency bulkhead which was visibly twisted. They turned to find another way but the orbs had caught up with them. Falling down on one knee Jack fired his gun and heard Sheppard fire two rounds into the swarm before the gun begun to click and four rounds later his own gun did the same. With only a few meters between the hissing orbs and them he reached down to take out a new magazine, but he only felt his own leg. Looking up again he saw it lying on the floor on the other side of the orbs. To his side he saw Sheppard return the pistol to its holster, they were both out of ammunition and looking at each other.

With their backs to the bulkhead they heard a whoosh followed by a bang as part of the bulkhead feel down between them. As if on cue the swarm of orbs stopped in their tracks and formed up in a neat line while the hissing stopped.

"Sirs?" a voice asked through the hole.

"We're here Lieutenant" Sheppard replied as he stepped away from the bulkhead and through the hole. It was one of his men and her team, they had been on Atlantis with them since the start.

"You sent those things to gas us?" Jack asked.

"Yes Sir. They were meant to gas you with oxygen and a fire suppressant, or at least that's what Dr. Zelenka told us he'd been told. They seek out lifeforms and do their best to provide them with a safe atmosphere."

"A note would have been fucking nice" Jack growled while they made their way to the rings and returned to Atlantis.

* * *

With awe everyone in the Ancient outpost watched as the city descended into the lower atmosphere above them. A few kilometers above the surface the city stopped and then it moved sideways for something resembling a victory lap around the globe, then it left for Pegasus again.

* * *

Now there was no more denying it, not for anyone, no government could suppress it, the secret was out, humanity was not alone in the universe. With most of the world's largest cities in flames and ruins the news was more or less like throwing a letter bomb into a house set aflame, very few paid it any attention, at least until the rebuilding had begun. Around the world the consequences of the attack was evident, even the most pacifistic of countries begun to plan and build up their armies and military installations.

War was coming.

 **A/N:** Please do leave a review now that this book is finished. The next book is not done yet so it will be a few weeks until I have finished it.


	20. Chapter 20

Hello people I'm back with the next book in this saga check out the following link to find it: Book 2: SEN  
The rest of the page is just a summary of what you've just read in this story for anyone wanting to refresh their memory.

 **Summary of Book 1: Earth**

On a remote Goa'uld planet a Jaffa named Mokar is chosen to attempt an ancient trial which the Goa'uld have been sending Jaffa into since its discovery. Since this is a story and he is the hero here he passes the trials and earns the rewards. He finds himself transforming into an Alterran (Ancient) and is tasked with rebuilding the Alterran empire. He comes into contact with Earth and gains access to a few Naquadah generators. With them he powers up some of the Alterran facilities which are scattered through out the galaxy.

Meanwhile on Earth former senator Robert Kinsey has become president of the USA when a re-election is suddenly required after the president dies. While watching the news about this O'Neill's house is stormed by hostile agents. After overmanning them he hurries to the SGC and manages to escape through the gate.

After escaping Earth O'Neill is chased through the gate network and is saved by Mokar, now fully Alterran. O'Neill recruit Teal'c who has been captured by the Free Jaffa Nation and decide to retake Atlantis which is in the hands of unknown forces. While O'Neill recruited Teal'c Mokar gains the assistance of a race, the Angelo, who resemble angels and were created by the Alterra to fight a race called the Abasy, they are beings existing in other dimensions and fight using suits and escape back to their own dimension when the suits are destroyed. At the same time Sheppard and McKay tries to escape from one of the 304s which they have been locked up inside after Atlantis was taken from them.

After many twists and turns the two groups meet up and together they make sure the city is safe. Mokar sends Sheppard to recover Weirs body and after offering McKay the chance to do it Mokar grows her a new body and transfers her into it. Immediately she is given the task to assemble Earth's defence against the Goa'uld who are controlling Robert Kinsey and the fleet of Ha'taks around the planet after the men saved on Atlantis has stormed the SGC and recovered the gate, led by Mokar, O'Neill and Sheppard.

Inside the SGC Samantha Carter finds herself bound to a chair and hear the other base personnel being executed one by one, when it is her turn to die she manages to put up a fight but is stunned. When she wakes up she is on board one of the 304s, which is commanded by O'Neill, and flown to the Alterran outpost in Antarctica. From there Weir manages to unite the military forces and with two 304s, a salvaged Aurora and Atlantis they destroy the alien armada. Only Atlantis leaves the battle intact.


End file.
